How The Looking Glass Works
The World's Most Advanced Light Field Technology
Proprietary Light Field Technology
Looking Glass is the whole widget: a combination of advanced optics, custom electronics and a software stack designed for the creation and consumption of holographic content. At its core, the Looking Glass is powered by our proprietary light field technology, generating between 45-100 views of a 3D scene. As a result, multiple people can view full-color, dynamic, 60fps three-dimensional holograms in any of the Looking Glass displays without needing to gear up in AR/VR headsets.
50-60º view cone depending on model
Multiple user viewing
No headset required
Physically Present Holograms
On a conventional 2D display, every pixel shines with two properties: intensity and color. But the Looking Glass is different. By adding a third property of directionality to millions of points of light, the Looking Glass can reproduce real and synthetic 3D information more realistically than anything else before. As a viewer moves left and right, their eyes perceive stereoscopic images from different points of view, meaning that the dimensionality and also finer details like specular reflections of the real world are reproduced.
Holograms You Can Touch
The second generation of Looking Glass displays (like the Looking Glass Portrait) has a reworked optical system so that the holograms are no longer “contained” in a volume. They can project in front of and behind the physical display, meaning you can literally touch these holograms.
The Looking Glass is more than just hardware. Every Looking Glass ships with a suite of software plugins and integrations designed to transform most types of 3D content into holograms. For both beginners and advanced users.
The Looking Glass vs other displays
| Features | AR/VR Headsets | 3D Monitors | CAVE | Peppers Ghost (e.g. Tupac Hologram) | Looking Glass |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stereo 3D Content | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Viewable from different perspectives | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Headset-free experience | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Viewers per device | 1 | 1 | A few | Many | Many |
| Ease of Setup | Medium | Easy | Difficult | Medium | Easy |
| Price of Deployment | $$ | $$ | $$$ | $ - $$$ | $ |
| Nauseau / Discomfort Level | Medium | Medium | Medium | None (similar to 2D display) | None (similar to 2D display) |
In addition to its industry-leading proprietary light field technology, the Looking Glass displays come paired with an expansive set of software tools, applications and utilities to fit any need.