91–100 of 253 posts
Yeah it sounds like a great option to place a camera invisibly in the middle top half of your screen so you can actually look a person in the eye when videoconferencing. No more weirdly looking down or to the side for everyone. I'm sure it can be used for creepiness as well but I see the benefits too.
iPhones solve the camera angle by changing the position of the pupil in software instead.
It's a reverse light guide. We've been beam forming for a long time, it's unsurprising that the reverse is possible (imaging through a light pipe). The principal issue will be gathering enough energy. A well lit source like a bathroom mirror (mirror behind the light guide) could work pretty well I'd wager. If the light guide is too efficient then it will appear opaque, so there is a trade-off. I find "turns any windo…
> Zeiss isn't going to aspire to sell cheap glass on razor thin margins. why not?
The article is poorly written, as it only discusses the camera component. Strangely, they chose stock images of holographic and optical displays, but didn’t mention that even once. The Zeiss site is a much better read: https://www.zeiss.com/corporate/en/about-zeiss/present/newsr... In summary: 1) ZEISS unveils holographic Smart Glass at CES 2024, both for displays/projection/filtering, but also another component whic…
Edit: theres an actually good demo video showing the real state of the tech rather than mockups: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NORPeCcIXRQ buried below in the comments so just surfacing higher. everything else is artists lying to you. --- > Glass surfaces can also generate energy. The microoptical layer in the window pane absorbs incident sunlight and transmits it in concentrated form to a solar cell. This combines…
Yeah it sounds like a great option to place a camera invisibly in the middle top half of your screen so you can actually look a person in the eye when videoconferencing. No more weirdly looking down or to the side for everyone. I'm sure it can be used for creepiness as well but I see the benefits too.
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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you sure? I remember that being present briefly in a beta several years ago, but then it was removed. I don't remember it ever coming back.
Some searching says it was trialed in iOS 13 betas, but didn't make it into the final cut. It was released with iOS 14 though. https://ios.gadgethacks.com/how-to/disable-facetimes-creepy-...
For the people kinda worried: this is a highly specialized piece of glass that is extremely complicated to manufacture at present and must, due to the laws of thermodynamics, not be 100% transparent. It's not going to allow surveillance through existing glass installations in any form, just possibly new ones if there's room for the support equipment and through the use of 4-5 digit piles of cash. Any camera glass lik…
It's a reverse light guide. We've been beam forming for a long time, it's unsurprising that the reverse is possible (imaging through a light pipe). The principal issue will be gathering enough energy. A well lit source like a bathroom mirror (mirror behind the light guide) could work pretty well I'd wager. If the light guide is too efficient then it will appear opaque, so there is a trade-off. I find "turns any windo…
> It's a reverse light guide. We've been beam forming for a long time, it's unsurprising that the reverse is possible (imaging through a light pipe). Beamforming in RF frequencies is old, beamforming at optical wavelengths is pretty new shit. Doing the reverse, that is receiving a signal, is brand spanking new fresh out the cow hot shit at any frequency.
Projector light engines include potentially many light-beam forming condensing and projection lenses precisely to concentrate light into a uniform quadrilateral. That's not new. The industry continues to advance, though.
Even holographic projection isn't new. This is just that, except the light is (sort of) taking the reverse path.
Technically there is no reason why it can't also project light outwards simultaneously. However light guides aren't really reversible like that: the light usually exits through a small fraction of the guide's external surface area. Reversing that means the entire external surface area is potentially collecting light, which would result in some undesirable caustics in all scenarios I can imagine. Light engines are in part designed to account for this (by reflecting or sinking light into an absorber) but this is still pretty different from what Zeiss is promoting.
For a small permanent installation where you are in control of the lighting I could see this working relatively well, but I have a hard time imagining you could get close anything resembling photo quality without a lot of environmental treatment. Conversely holographic projection is pretty doable on a mobile platform like a headset.
This is pretty new only in that it's probably at least an order of magnitude more difficult to accomplish and thus hasn't been viable up until now. Fundamentally none of the concepts are new, as far as I can tell.
As an example look at your nearest window and imagine it divided into a grid of uniform pixels. Each pixel is a small mirror that reflects a point of focus (wherever you are) to a another, smaller point on an imaging sensor somewhere in the frame. This would look pretty jarring (and jagged) to most people, until you layer a complimentary piece of glass on top of it to make the exterior flush. The two pieces of glass would be high enough precision that once you put them together they are effectively one piece of glass. Ta da.
This is effectively the same process as making any other multi-lensed glass, and that's Zeiss's wheelhouse.
The article is poorly written, as it only discusses the camera component. Strangely, they chose stock images of holographic and optical displays, but didn’t mention that even once. The Zeiss site is a much better read: https://www.zeiss.com/corporate/en/about-zeiss/present/newsr... In summary: 1) ZEISS unveils holographic Smart Glass at CES 2024, both for displays/projection/filtering, but also another component whic…
>nd light guiding elements to redirect incident light to a concealed sensor, So you can't just stick on any existing window or pane of glass? That's good.
> The Holocam technology "uses holographic in-coupling, light guiding and de-coupling elements to redirect the incoming light of a transparent medium to a hidden image sensor."
That suggests, at least to me, that you'll need something more than just a simple sheet of glass. There's probably some engineering required to allow light to be guided and redirected towards what sounds like a typical camera sensor.