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Looking Glass – A new type of holographic interface

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Re: Looking Glass – A new type of holographic interface

#61

Post by Animats »

It's not a hologram, of course. It's a stack of flat displays.

That's been tried before, in many ways. The first try was a vibrating mirror.[1] There's a flat rotating mirror system from FakeSpace.[2] It's not bad; you can walk around it. Move vertically, though, and the illusion breaks down. There's a scheme with gas ionized by intersecting laser beams. That's very low-rez, but truly volumetric.

Eventually, someone may come up with a real hologram system with decent resolution. A research group at MIT built one, but it was very low resolution and single-color. It's not impossible. But this isn't it.

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gvPS1m40gw

Re: Looking Glass – A new type of holographic interface

#62

Post by mosselman »

"I think most people don’t want this 1984 vision of the future, where everyone is geared up 16 hours a day."

I assume the author means the book '1984' by George Orwell and I come to the conclusion that the author has never read the book and does not know what it is about. Not every dystopian story is 1984. A far more logical reference would have been to 'Ready Player One' by Ernest Cline which is in fact about a dystopia in which people _are_ 'geared up' all the time.

I recommend both books, the first is a work of genius and is, sadly, very relevant today and the second because it is very entertaining and might offer insights into the development of VR in the near future.

Re: Looking Glass – A new type of holographic interface

#64

Post by dosy »

chmike wrote: post #59

Holography is a very particular set of 3d image rendering technique. This volumetric display is not holographic. To me it's a frustration. Microsoft's highjacking of the word holography is also frustrating. Such abuse does not server the product and it's inventors. Truly holographic displays will emerge once we can control ligth interference in the display.

> Truly holographic displays will emerge once we can control ligth interference in the display.

Could you explain this a bit more please to give an idea of the path to get there?

Re: Looking Glass – A new type of holographic interface

#65

Post by lhl »

Animats wrote: post #61

It's not a hologram, of course. It's a stack of flat displays. That's been tried before, in many ways. The first try was a vibrating mirror.[1] There's a flat rotating mirror system from FakeSpace.[2] It's not bad; you can walk around it. Move vertically, though, and the illusion breaks down. There's a scheme with gas ionized by intersecting laser beams. That's very low-rez, but truly volumetric. Eventually, someone…

I'm pretty impressed by what FOVI3D [1] has been doing w/ their light field displays. Here's a recent interview from SID Display Week this year [2] that's refreshing because the CTO (in the interview) goes into some of the details of the challenges they face and isn't unrealistic about how hard it'll be to overcome them.

[1] http://www.fovi3d.com/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GK4544D4PUo

Re: Looking Glass – A new type of holographic interface

#66

Post by beobab »

mosselman wrote: post #62

"I think most people don’t want this 1984 vision of the future, where everyone is geared up 16 hours a day." I assume the author means the book '1984' by George Orwell and I come to the conclusion that the author has never read the book and does not know what it is about. Not every dystopian story is 1984. A far more logical reference would have been to 'Ready Player One' by Ernest Cline which is in fact about a dyst…

Literary warning: The first book shocked me to the core of my being, and I wept genuine tears of sorrow and grief;

The second had me cheering the hero on. It's a great action book with loads of geekery and nerdness from my childhood.

My recommendation: Read 1984 first, so you have good feelings to end on.

Re: Looking Glass – A new type of holographic interface

#68

Post by _ph_ »

dosy wrote: post #64
chmike wrote: post #59

Holography is a very particular set of 3d image rendering technique. This volumetric display is not holographic. To me it's a frustration. Microsoft's highjacking of the word holography is also frustrating. Such abuse does not server the product and it's inventors. Truly holographic displays will emerge once we can control ligth interference in the display.

> Truly holographic displays will emerge once we can control ligth interference in the display. Could you explain this a bit more please to give an idea of the path to get there?

Not the poster above, but I will try a short explanation. You see an object, because light goes from its surface (either emitted or reflected ambient light) to your eyes. You see it in 3 dimensions, because the light differs by the viewing angle. Holography is a technology of recording the light "emitted" by the object. The light has to be recorded in direction and intensity. This is done via interference between the object light (waves) and a reference light wave, which usually is a planar wave of light.

This interference creates an interference pattern, which can be recorded by film. The trick is, that if you develop the film to get the black and white pattern, you can shine the reference wave onto the film and it interacts with the interference pattern such that the object wave is reconstructed. A hologram such is an exact recording of the light emitted by the object. This is something the display tries to emulate by offering 64 different images, but not quite the same. As the interference pattern is just a greyscale image, one could use an ultra-high resolution lcd display to synthesize that - there have been demonstrators of that, but I am not aware of a large holographic display so far.

Re: Looking Glass – A new type of holographic interface

#69

Post by keksdev »

colanderman wrote: post #48
doublerebel wrote: post #25

I played with the large size version of Looking Glass at AR in Action conf this January at MIT. It's really cool, and the coolest part is the interaction is intuitive. You really can just touch a point on the hologram and have it react at that point. As others have mentioned, it requires pushing quite a number of simultaneous views of the hologram through a hidpi display, the experienced resolution is not very high a…

Do you remember if the image varies in the vertical plane as well as the horizontal? The demo videos only move the camera horizontally.

From the comments on Kickstarter: "Hi! The Looking Glass is horizontal-parallax-only."

Re: Looking Glass – A new type of holographic interface

#70

Post by bawana »

powerapple wrote: post #56
colanderman wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you remember if the image varies in the vertical plane as well as the horizontal? The demo videos only move the camera horizontally.

if it is stacked screens, I don't see any reason it will work horizontally only. I believe the view angle is still very limited. I'd love to use this for Skype chat or something.

If the lenticular lens is made of columns (as those fake 3D postcards are) then only horizontal shift is 3D-able. To display verticality, the lenticular lenses could be hemispheres. However, to encode vertical 3D-ness you would need 45 images for each 2 degrees off the horizontal so as your head bobs up and down, it can pick up the off axis images. So that's 45 images x 45 axes = 2025 images per frame.
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