The Looking Glass: A Holographic Display for 3D Creators
The Looking Glass - a new type of holographic display - is now available in very limited quantity.
Designed by and for 3D creators.
Over the past four years, our team of holographers, optical/mechanical/electrical engineers, Unity devs and 3D graphic artists have been working to create the magic that is the Looking Glass - a unique holographic display that uses a combination of lightfield and volumetric technologies.
Now for the first time, groups of people can see and interact with a virtual three-dimensional world on their desk, unaided by VR or AR headsets.And we’ve created a number of tools to enable 3D creators to easily bring their work to life in the Looking Glass.
There are a number of tools to enable 3D creators to easily bring their work to life in the Looking Glass.
All of the Looking Glass apps shown on this page and our website were made using our HoloPlay Unity SDK. As a backer, you will get access to this SDK so that you can create interactive holographic apps of your own.
3D model and animations in OBJ, FBX, STL and gLTF format can be imported into the Looking Glass with a couple clicks using the Model and Animation Importer App.
Dozens of holographic apps are available for free download using the App Library, included with every Looking Glass shipment. These include volumetric video clips, holographic film shorts, lightfield and 3D scan viewer apps, new types of holographic games, virtual pets, CT-scan/DICOM importers, a WYSIWYG 3D model previewer for 3D printing, and much more. By the end of the year, creators will also be able to share their own apps via the Library with Looking Glass owners around the world.
An exporter directly from Maya will also available for free download, with live viewports from Maya, Zbrush, Blender, Tinkercad, and Solidworks in development, to be made available for free to all Looking Glass backers.
Thursday, July 19, 2018
Will it Sink or Swim? For now, it's floating.
Last week’s Magic Leap reveal landed with precious little enchantment, and more the type of thud one might expect from a whale hitting a well-waxed gym floor. It’s not exactly an uncommon state affairs, either. In fact, it’s an issue that’s been common to a number of high-profile AR launches.
Over at VentureBeat, Jeremy Horowitz has nailed down an explanation for this problem. It’s the result of a fundamental disconnect between the capabilities of the high-end wearable devices we’ve seen and the rather more prosaic options available to non-wearable products. Or, in his words: “The crux of AR’s issue is that there’s no affordable wearable hardware out there. There’s wearable hardware, but it’s not affordable. And there’s affordable hardware, but it’s not wearable.”
Some readers pushed back against my own withering critique of Magic Leap’s demo, for which I make no apologies. Given that the company has received $2.3B in funding, it’s reasonable to expect more than a blurry rock-throwing monster. But it may be worth unpacking why that demo is so uninspired. A small rock monster whose missile strikes an external wall and crumbles may be technically impressive, inasmuch as it shows a holographic element responding to a real-world surface. But what it doesn’t show is any way for that capability to be either independently useful (like an egg timer) or jaw-droppingly immersive (like the idea of a whale that can breach through the solid floor of one’s viewing space).
This tension between what hardware can accomplish, and what customers are willing to pay for, seems to lie at the root of many complex problems with both AR and VR. In some cases, the issues are made that much tougher to solve simply because showing the features of the underlying hardware is genuinely difficult. Starting with the 3-D push almost a decade ago, we’ve seen manufacturers ramp up a number of technologies that are hard to showcase if people aren’t watching the demos live and in person. Other factors, like battery life, software support, and integrated hardware performance have presented profound challenges as well.
Until we find a way to start closing some of these gaps, I’m not optimistic that AR or VR will grow particularly well.
A new standard called VirtualLink will let next-gen VR devices use the same type of cable.
One of the problems with setting up a virtual reality (VR) system is that a lot of the cables and connectors are entirely proprietary. For example, an Oculus Rift cable will only work with an Oculus Rift. If your cable develops a problem it can be expensive to replace. A new industry consortium will soon chance that with the introduction of the new VirtualLink specification.
The VirtualLink consortium is being led by well-known industry names such as Nvidia, Oculus, Valve, AMD and Microsoft who have collaborated to introduce a new specification that will allow next-generation VR headsets to connect with PCs or other devices using a high-bandwidth USB Type-C cable.
The new connection has been labelled as an Alternate Mode of USB-C, and it allows for VR setup to be simplified and sped up, making the process easier for consumers, removing one of the barriers towards mass adoption for VR.
The adoption of the new standard means that VR requires fewer ports, which means immersive experiences are now possible for users who own smaller devices with fewer ports, such as lightweight notebooks.
The VirtualLink standard has been purpose-built for VR, and has been optimised for latency and bandwidth demands, a crucial component of ensuring a smooth and comfortable VR experience for users. VirtualLink allows for four high-speed HBR3 DisplayPort lanes, which are scalable for future requirements; a USB3.1 data channel can support streaming data from high-resolutions sensors and cameras as well as up to 27 watts of power.
“At Oculus, we’re committed to making VR easily approachable for a wide variety of people,” said Nate Mitchell, head of Rift, at Oculus. “A consolidated connection point is critical in removing barriers to experiencing high-powered PC VR. With the adoption of VirtualLink technology, purpose-built for VR, we look forward to helping push the industry forward into the next phase of VR.
