When you think about holographic displays, you might think about a futuristic movie you once saw, or some piece of tech that costs thousands upon thousands of dollars. What you might not think about is a product that costs less than $400, is as small as an iPad, and doesn’t need any fancy equipment to work.
We’re talking about the Looking Glass Portrait Holographic Display. It’s a device that can be used to view holographic photos, videos, and 3D models within a 58-degree viewing cone — essentially it is giving you a visual that approaches a 3D video or hologram, but can be seen by more than a single person at once and does not need special glasses to work.
YOUR OWN PERSONAL HOLOGRAPH
The Portrait is a more compact, less expensive version of an earlier product by Looking Glass Factory and features a 7.9-inch display and an internal integrated Wi-Fi module. For adding and removing media, the Portrait has HDMI, USB-C, and 3.5-inch stereo audio jack ports. The display must be plugged into a power source to work, but does feature a built-in Raspberry Pi 4, which allows for standalone use.
Looking Glass Factory states that its display is a proprietary blend of the light field and volumetric tech. When unpacked, this means that the display is refracting light through glass and projecting it to various points of the screen at the same time; this fools your brain into picking up a 3D image. The Portrait spits out between 45 to 100 separate images of 3D screens to make its holograms, which some have noted work especially well for captures of light field photography.
THREE DIMENSIONS FOR ALL
Looking Glass Portrait isn’t the only holographic light field display on the market, but it exists at a price point that is much more affordable than other displays — take, for example, Sony’s $5,000 Spatial Reality Display. In contrast, Looking Glass Portrait Holographic Display comes in at $349 without the promotional Kickstarter pricing, which knocks that price down a full $100.
The world of the digital holographic display can be a bit daunting to the uninitiated, but Looking Glass Factory is striving to make their device accessible to all. To that end, the process of depth mapping photos has gotten more streamlined, and you can make holographs from photos taken on your iPhone. The Portrait’s aforementioned price tag is definitely more affordable than a lot of other similar products.
UNLOCK YOUR CREATIVITY
Using the Looking Glass Factory’s HoloPlay Studio software, you have the ability to upload your own photos, videos, and 3D models to the Portrait. If you want to go even deeper, you can sync up your device with Microsoft’s Azure Kinect, Intel’s RealSense, or even a Leap Motion Controller. Either will allow you to mess around with more interactive holograms, making the Portrait an especially great tool if you are a 3D designer or are simply interested in 3D modeling.
Beyond that, the options are wide open. Maybe you work in volumetric video production or need vivid playback of your photogrammetry-based 3D scans. Maybe you do AR and are looking for an interactive display. Maybe you are interested in taking and then displaying light field photos, or maybe you just want to see that photo you snapped on your phone come alive. Whatever your needs, the Portrait is an accessible way to look at the future, today.
The Looking Glass Portrait Holographic Display is now available on Kickstarter – for the rest of the campaign, it is going for $249, and the final retail price will end up being $349. For more information on the product, as well as various bundles available, check out the Kickstarter today, and start seeing media in three dimensions, like you always imagined you would.
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