Despite them doing their best to cover it up with quick editing and cherry picked angles, it's clear this has very low depth resolution and foggy picture quality.<p>If this only uses light, how would it deal with occlusion? It would be impossible to put a dark object in front of a lighter one, right?
They say it's not a parlor trick, but it's nowhere near true holography or anything like it. True holography records the object's wavefront as a flat interference pattern, encoding the phase information from the object (and also creating a very precise model of its surface), creating a diffraction grating which can then be used to replay the identical wave when illuminated by a suitable reference source of light.<p>This is the only known way to create true images with real depth of field and parallax, and requires ultra high resolution to both record and display the microscopic interference pattern.<p>There is a good book <a href="https://www.crcpress.com/Ultra-Realistic-Imaging-Advanced-Techniques-in-Analogue-and-Digital-Colour/Bjelkhagen-Brotherton-Ratcliffe/p/book/9781439827994" rel="nofollow">https://www.crcpress.com/Ultra-Realistic-Imaging-Advanced-Te...</a> that has the mathematical basis for which the real principle of holography could be applied, given a capable enough display technology, to re-create an exact replica of the light field/wavefront that is identical to what we see in real life. Of course, a single static image with sufficient resolution of about 3"x5" in real life contains over 100 GB of data. The information carrying capacity of light is amazing.<p>None of the current VR/AR systems (including MagicLeap) use anything close to what is required, and we are still ways off in both display tech and GPU bandwidth to even generate a single, static image in a consumer product.
I saw a comment today on HN showing voxiebox[1] which seems to have a better volumetric display, unlike this one which has a very small number of discrete layers.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.voxiebox.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.voxiebox.com/</a>
I'll start by saying this is a really interesting device, and a very impressive technological feat. However, I have some major criticisms too:<p>The only advantage I see to this vs. something like HoloLens is that it doesn't require a head mounted display. Unfortunately for this project, that's not as big a barrier for serious companies as they need it to be. In time I think this "advantage" will also dwindle due to shrinking component size, etc.<p>The price is also considerable - it's about a thousand dollars cheaper than a HoloLens (I'm going to keep going back to HoloLens because to me they're directly comparable.) But the thousand saved also comes with some significant drawbacks:<p>- The notion of collaboration seems to be non-existent with this device - I don't see them showing how that might work based on their promo clips. Seems to be single user driven.<p>- It has a back-face. How do you render something like text so that it's readable from all perspectives?<p>- Control appears to be limited with no standard input. HoloLens tracks the users hands, by comparison.<p>- Does it have a top on it? At that point, what really separates it from a 3D TV? Seems like you'd only get limited perspective translation.<p>I'm having trouble coming up with really practical applications for such a device, that wouldn't be better suited by a head mounted personal device. I fully support the effort if they find their niche, but coming from a VR/MR point of view, I can't really see any real advantages. Please enlighten me! I don't mean to be a downer!
The description is rather vague. It claims 2 million voxels and no moving parts. That's resolution of maybe 200 x 200 x 50; the depth dimension seems smaller than the others. Is is some optical system which projects on 50 plates (maybe less), or something like that? It looks like they're somehow optically remapping a projector to multiple planes at lower resolution.<p>There have been depth displays before - vibrating mirror devices (a mirror mounted on a subwoofer driver) and such. Today we have enough GPU power to drive a volumetric display, at least at the modest resolution of this device.<p>But it's awfully low-res. Once you get tired of the 3D effect, it's going to be painful.
It would be interesting to find out what the dimensions of this are in voxels. The 2 million voxels makes me think this is based on a 1920x1080 projector.<p>A graphic on <a href="https://www.lookingglassfactory.com/how/" rel="nofollow">https://www.lookingglassfactory.com/how/</a> showing the obligatory macbook has its display divided vertically into what looks like 10 slices - so perhaps 1920x108x10?<p>That would seem plausible as to what the photos on the site represent, but some of the 3d renders use a much higher vertical resolution for the display.<p>(This is just an educated guess, of course.)
I believe the video is mostly concealing one important fact: the resolution in the z-axis is very low. That's the only way to explain the fairly high-res images in the demo when there are only 2 million voxels.<p>I'd guess the device is made of something like 20 stacked panels, each with a 300 x 300 resolution.
Fun idea, but the resolution is absurdly low, and as an emissive display it won't be able to block light (show dark things) without trickery or some drawbacks (like tinting the view glass, or requiring all lights to be off).<p>"people of all ages can come together to experience something that’s future AF."<p>Is the target audience "gullible ass"?