The Looking Glass

Nope! The illusions showing Tupac at Coachella and Michael Jackson at the Billboard Music Awards were using a 156-year-old parlor trick known as Pepper’s Ghost. This illusion is simply a 2D image, reflected on a piece of film or glass. When viewed from a large distance of 30+ feet, your eyes can’t tell what’s 2D or 3D. But if you get up close to a Pepper’s Ghost, the illusion collapses and you see it’s just a 2D reflection after all.

On the other hand, the Looking Glass generates a truly three-dimensional virtual scene with 45 distinct views shooting out into the real world. What this means is that up close, you still feel as if the content in the Looking Glass is alive and 3D — because it is!

Both conventional holograms and the Looking Glass are viewable by groups of people without VR or AR headgear or 3D glasses. But whereas conventional holograms are more analogous to photographs (static — they don’t move), the Looking Glass technology is more analogous to movies (dynamic and alive).

The Looking Glass moves and updates at 60 frames per second, is in full-color, with content that is generated from a connected computer. So while a Looking Glass is technically a lightfield display with volumetric characteristics and not based on conventional holographic techniques, it’s the closest we’ve ever come to putting the holograms we know and love from Star Wars and Adventure Time on our desks.

No tracking tricks here! All video footage is shot with a regular camera and is similar to what you’d see in real life (actually it’s a bit better in real life). The Looking Glass accomplishes this by generating 45 distinct views of that virtual scene and pushing those out into the world simultaneously, at 60 frames per second in full color.

The Looking Glass supports various hardware configurations including the MacBook Pro “Core i5” 2.7. However for best viewing experience we recommend the following specifications:

Operating system: Windows 10 64-bit
CPU: Equivalent to Intel Core i5 or above
Graphics card*: Equivalent to Nvidia GTX 1060 or above
RAM: 4GB or above
Internal storage: 128GB or above

It’s possible to run a number of holographic apps on the Looking Glass with computers with lower specs, but we can’t guarantee all apps will run at a decent framerate. In other words, we’re being a little overly cautious here and if you have questions about if your computer will work with a Looking Glass, message us here or write [email protected]

(*The Looking Glass only works with graphics cards that are able to output 2560 x 1600 or above.)

The Standard and Large Looking Glasses listed are the only system we will be producing in 2018. These can be tiled together into 1×2, 2×2 and larger arrays for substantially larger volumes. That all said, the technology behind the Looking Glass can scale to larger sizes, and we have larger experimental systems in development in our labs. But we won’t be producing these or even publicly showing these experimental systems in 2018.