Live data from Hacker News

Looking Glass Portrait – Holographic Display

lookingglassfactory.com

1–10 of 55 posts

Re: Looking Glass Portrait – Holographic Display

#4
post #2

What could this be useful for?

Games, 3d modeling, novel UI - better than 1080p resolution and 60hz refresh means the experience could actually be good, and not feel like a cheap hacky "pepper's ghost" type trick.

That price feels right, and the product is pretty damn cool, imo.

Re: Looking Glass Portrait – Holographic Display

#7
post #2

What could this be useful for?

Games, 3d modeling, novel UI - better than 1080p resolution and 60hz refresh means the experience could actually be good, and not feel like a cheap hacky "pepper's ghost" type trick. That price feels right, and the product is pretty damn cool, imo.

3D modeling and novel UI implies there's a new way to interact with the content on the display. Aside from the shallow depth effect, the input is still perfectly 2D. You can't touch and manipulate a 3D object here any more than you can on a tablet.

The fact there's no killer app here and potential uses fall flat upon closer inspection will likely mean this technology has more of a future at entertainment venues, maybe museums, I don't know. But not as personal mainstream devices.

Re: Looking Glass Portrait – Holographic Display

#8
I was pretty excited by this, so I went to pre-order. On the add-ons page, there are some nice additions like a leap motion controller. But there's also this:

    2D-to-3D Conversion: 1000 Credits
    Convert 2D images into 3D depth images for holographic display.
    +$150.00

    2D-to-3D Conversion: 100 Credits
    Convert 2D images into 3D depth images for holographic display.
    +$20.00
There's no mention of this type of per-interaction charging model on the product's splash page.

Instead of excited I'm now disillusioned and irritated.

Imagine Adobe tried to charge you every time you converted an image format in photoshop. Is the conversion process so complex that you need to upload a sample image to their servers or something? Why on earth can't I do that locally as many times as I like? It totally stymies experimentation.

Re: Looking Glass Portrait – Holographic Display

#10
post #2

What could this be useful for?

Games, 3d modeling, novel UI - better than 1080p resolution and 60hz refresh means the experience could actually be good, and not feel like a cheap hacky "pepper's ghost" type trick. That price feels right, and the product is pretty damn cool, imo.

This doesn't have better than 1080p res does it? I didn't see mention of a refresh rate anywhere either but the screen this uses is 2048 x 1536 and it purports 100 views so the actual image resolution is likely on the order of 200 x 150. I imagine it feels a bit better than that since you're seeing multiple images. Also note that the hologram only appears 3D in one plane, if you move above or below the plane the illusion is lost (correct me if I'm wrong on that I haven't seen one in person). It's not useful in this form, but lenticular displays are neat and I might try and build one sometime.
Post reply on HN