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Zeiss's "Holocam" turns glass windows into cameras

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Re: Zeiss's "Holocam" turns glass windows into cameras

#201

Post by terminous »

crazygringo wrote: post #191

I've read through all the comments here but I still don't have the slightest idea of how this works . I see some references to "light guides" and words like "coupling" but I don't know what those mean at all, and all of my googling is not helping to explain how light guides embedded in a thin, mostly transparent layer could possibly be used to project a hi-res holographic 3D light field out of a piece of glass. How b…

Don't think of it like a transparent camera. Think of the window as a giant external periscope lens, connected to the rest of the camera with such thin fiber optics that you can't notice.

Re: Zeiss's "Holocam" turns glass windows into cameras

#202

Post by WhackyIdeas »

ijhuygft776 wrote: post #192
AnarchismIsCool wrote: post #74

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 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. Total surveillance is just a matter of time...

I agree. I had this worrying idea (realisation..?) that one day, maybe triple digit years away, maybe sooner, that tiny cameras and mics the size of grains of salt will be everywhere. They will cost nothing to produce, be self-charging, interconnected to each other and created to ‘reduce crime’ or ‘make you safer’. And in the same way as forever chemicals, you can’t get rid of them. Trillions of them, in fields, the ground. Spreading around stuck to your shoes, on your car tires.

Just a crazy idea, but I think that if they could make that happen today then they would. And that part is the main point - There is no limit to surveillance anymore. I live in the UK, that realisation is in my face every day. Can’t even take a trip to Tesco without being run through facial recognition.

There is no care for the concept of privacy anymore. All the richest companies in the world don’t make their money from caring about our privacy.

Re: Zeiss's "Holocam" turns glass windows into cameras

#203

Post by fortyseven »

godelski wrote: post #177
AnarchismIsCool wrote: post #74

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…

> due to the laws of thermodynamics, not be 100% transparent. How useful is this statement though? Regular glass isn't 100% transparent either, even in just the visible spectrum. Shouldn't we be more concerned with the delta in the visible spectrum is if we're concerned about easy identification? (before mentioning that plenty of glass is purposefully tinted and dynamic tinting is an application here) And reasonably,…

I was just thinking to make ALL the glass the same tint, regardless of specialty.

Re: Zeiss's "Holocam" turns glass windows into cameras

#204

Post by crazygringo »

terminous wrote: post #201
crazygringo wrote: post #191

I've read through all the comments here but I still don't have the slightest idea of how this works . I see some references to "light guides" and words like "coupling" but I don't know what those mean at all, and all of my googling is not helping to explain how light guides embedded in a thin, mostly transparent layer could possibly be used to project a hi-res holographic 3D light field out of a piece of glass. How b…

Don't think of it like a transparent camera. Think of the window as a giant external periscope lens, connected to the rest of the camera with such thin fiber optics that you can't notice.

Sure, but how do you build fiber optics like that? Especially so each "pixel" has to shoot out hundreds (?) of separate fibers to cover every possible angle to achieve the holographic effect?

For just a 1MP display, we're talking like hundreds of millions of fibers? That fit in some thin transparent layer? How?

Re: Zeiss's "Holocam" turns glass windows into cameras

#205

Post by xyzzy_plugh »

godelski wrote: post #170
xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assure you it is semi opaque. A one way mirror is a primitive example of this. You can make the reflection increasingly transparent but it will be tinted up until the point it doesn't reflect anything. It may not be noticeably visible to the human eye under most lighting conditions, though.

>> but the example on the CES floor does not have an __apparent__ tint. > I assure you it is semi opaque > It may not be __noticeably visible__ to the human eye under most lighting conditions, though. I'm not sure you two are disagreeing. Seems like you're just reinforcing their point. I mean if someone said glass is opaque and their evidence is that you can't see through glass and your evidence is to point at UV lig…

Typically people can see better in the dark than imaging sensors can (only considering visible spectrum here), especially small sensors. If you redirect the light somewhere, what would you see? How much light would you need to divert?

If the image is grayscale and has very high gain/noise/ISO, then I imagine with a low enough frame rate you could avoid noticable tinting. You would likely still notice the tint in comparison to regular glass, I'm too lazy to do the napkin math though.

Practically speaking, I would expect it to be strictly more noticeable than glass for holographic projection. If true, it's likely noticeable.

But the eye is fickle. You don't notice the tint of, say, a car window when you've been inside for a bit. Or sunglasses.

Here's an arbitrary Google search result for in-glass HUDs: https://www.lumineq.com/applications/automotive

They state their glass is 70% transparent. That's definitely noticeably opaque.

Re: Zeiss's "Holocam" turns glass windows into cameras

#206

Post by augustulus »

IshKebab wrote: post #61
swyx wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Nah, this will only be good enough for sensor-level power (like 5W from a whole window). Only useful in very limited circumstances. It's not going to replace normal solar power.

5W is enough to power an ESP32

Re: Zeiss's "Holocam" turns glass windows into cameras

#207

Post by BirAdam »

WhackyIdeas wrote: post #202
ijhuygft776 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Total surveillance is just a matter of time...

I agree. I had this worrying idea (realisation..?) that one day, maybe triple digit years away, maybe sooner, that tiny cameras and mics the size of grains of salt will be everywhere. They will cost nothing to produce, be self-charging, interconnected to each other and created to ‘reduce crime’ or ‘make you safer’. And in the same way as forever chemicals, you can’t get rid of them. Trillions of them, in fields, the…

Politicians and high ranking unelected officials also will want privacy so truly omnipresent surveillance would be concomitant with jamming and obfuscation technologies. There’d just be endless arms race.

Re: Zeiss's "Holocam" turns glass windows into cameras

#208

Post by doodlesdev »

boxed wrote: post #76
wkat4242 wrote: post #38

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 does what??? How have I never heard about this before? Is this deployed right now? Is it always enabled? I have so many questions, don't even know where to start. That sounds amazing.

Re: Zeiss's "Holocam" turns glass windows into cameras

#209

Post by godelski »

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #205
godelski wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> but the example on the CES floor does not have an __apparent__ tint. > I assure you it is semi opaque > It may not be __noticeably visible__ to the human eye under most lighting conditions, though. I'm not sure you two are disagreeing. Seems like you're just reinforcing their point. I mean if someone said glass is opaque and their evidence is that you can't see through glass and your evidence is to point at UV lig…

Typically people can see better in the dark than imaging sensors can (only considering visible spectrum here), especially small sensors. If you redirect the light somewhere, what would you see? How much light would you need to divert? If the image is grayscale and has very high gain/noise/ISO, then I imagine with a low enough frame rate you could avoid noticable tinting. You would likely still notice the tint in comp…

> in the dark

I don't think how you framed this is accurate. The quality is a function of the pixel size and of course the exposure time. I mean those are the two main variables that control how much light hits the sensor, but we'd have to get into sensitivity to make direct comparisons (human eyes are VERY sensitive and some evidence that the average eye is sensitive to a single photon, but you're not going to see well with that and this is besides the point).

Definitely not a straight forward calculation and I'm feeling too lazy to go grab my optics books. But guesstimating here, there should be enough light considering you can see light and distortions when looking at the side of a pane. So I'd lean on it being more about the quality of the signal. Which glass is highly structured but I'm assuming that this type of glass has some unique optical properties to specifically make the side panels have higher quality signals. My understanding is that they are projecting from the side, so that's what I'm inferring from -- basically just reverse the photon direction through the medium and I don't have reason to believe that quality is directionally dependent (should I?). My whole spitballing is dependent on this understanding.

> it's likely noticeable.

Well one user said they didn't notice it.

> They state their glass is 70% transparent. That's definitely noticeably opaque.

That's not uncommon for Low-E glass, so maybe not very noticeable, especially in many different environments. But yeah, I think if you compared side by side you'd notice. I think we're just using different criteria and we probably decently align?

Idk, I am mostly thinking aloud here, so I do want to portray that I don't have high confidence here. It's been 10 years since I've been in an optics lab lol. But I've built microphones with really weak signals before and they are useful. Distorted, but useful. (Definitely not fun being forced to run experiments at 3am and find out someone is walking around on the other side of the building...) So I can't see why this couldn't (theoretically) be similarly done for a window? I definitely don't think this would work with a typical pane of glass, especially considering how they're cut, but this does seem like specialty glass specifically built for directing photons directed from an edge to the pane face. Any idea if it can only display to one face? (I'm sure you can invert img but projection face probably matters for a camera?)

Re: Zeiss's "Holocam" turns glass windows into cameras

#210

Post by akamoonknight »

WhackyIdeas wrote: post #202
ijhuygft776 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Total surveillance is just a matter of time...

I agree. I had this worrying idea (realisation..?) that one day, maybe triple digit years away, maybe sooner, that tiny cameras and mics the size of grains of salt will be everywhere. They will cost nothing to produce, be self-charging, interconnected to each other and created to ‘reduce crime’ or ‘make you safer’. And in the same way as forever chemicals, you can’t get rid of them. Trillions of them, in fields, the…

I believe I read a science fiction book around this topic. Postsingular by Rudy Rucker I believe, related to nanotechnology. Can't remember most of it, but delved a little into how it affects relationships re: every thing being visible always to everyone. Not sure I'd entirely recommend it, but still interesting to see the thoughts and outcomes others come up with in regard to these types of potential technological changes.
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