With the launch of Looking Glass Bridge 2.0 (formerly known as HoloPlay Service, or HoPS to some of you), we are fundamentally shifting the way in which our hardware displays communicate with our software.
A little background.
HoloPlay Service 1.0 was first released in December 2019. It was originally conceived as a driver layer to do one thing and one thing only: to allow software applications to query the connected Looking Glass display properties — in particular, the display calibration unique to every display.
Fast forward to early 2020, when we were beginning to ship thousands of Looking Glass Portrait units to creators and developers around the world. We needed to develop a suite of tools for hologram creation: enter HoloPlay Core JS, HoloPlay Studio, the HoloPlay Unity & Unreal Plugins, Diorama and Depth Recorder.
Over the years, the needs of our customers have evolved so much to the point where we now needed to take a big hop forward to ensure our software tools were continuing to be efficient.
Say hello to Looking Glass Bridge.
Looking Glass Bridge is built from the ground up to include all the functionality needed to create, edit and display holographic media for all our displays. In the long run, this means that our software team - and anyone looking to build on top of Looking Glass software - can now develop applications and integrations much faster with additional reliability and performance.
This new update unlocks a variety of capabilities including (but not limited to):
This update also shifts the role of Bridge from being a driver to becoming the backbone for all our products. We are simplifying the overall user experience, increasing product quality and now have the ability to develop new software and functionality at a faster pace than ever before. In line with this change, we are replacing the term HoloPlay with Looking Glass across all of our software applications and plugins. We are also renaming Service to Bridge given its key role in our software ecosystem.
Bridge is now live, and you can update this software by downloading this new version here. In the next couple of months, we’ll be rolling out the aforementioned new capabilities (and more) into our entire suite of software plugins and tools. While you won’t see some of this new functionality reflected across all of our software just yet, it is coming and we promise it will be worth the wait.
Nice Knowing you, HoPS. To the future!
