What is a Quilt?

Requirements

Looking Glass Bridge

Looking Glass Studio

Introduction

Quilts are an image standard that Looking Glass uses to produce 3D experiences. This standard is used to describe both still and moving images (pictures and videos). Here is an example quilt formatted for Looking Glass Portrait.

Space Nap by Jane Guan

The main benefit of the quilt format is that it can work for both images and videos! Quilts allow for an efficient way to store frame by frame data as .mp4, .webm or other common media formats. They're also compact. for example, the above quilt was compressed to be under 1MB of data!

Quilts serve a few purposes:

to save and retrieve images displayed in a Looking Glass (similar to image & video screenshots for 2D monitors)

as a compositing step in Looking Glass render pipelines found in our developer tools

as a format to work against to manually produce light field photos / videos

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‍Format

Each tile in the quilt is a conventional 2D image of a scene. The bottom-left tile of the quilt (view 0) is the leftmost view of the scene, and the top-right tile is the rightmost, like so:

Quilt File Formats

This standard may be applied to any conventional image or video file type. The most common are jpg, png, gif, mp4, mov.

File Naming Conventions

Most Looking Glass integrations output Quilts with the following naming structure:

filename_qsColumnsxRowsaAspectRatio.mp4

A quilt designed for Looking Glass Portrait with 8 columns and 6 rows would look like this:

filename_qs8x6a0.75.mp4

This allows our software like Looking Glass Studio to automatically import the quilt with the proper number of columns & rows, along with setting the proper aspect ratio. The Looking Glass Portrait has an aspect ratio of 4:3, which equates to 0.75. Looking Glass 16" & 32" systems have a 16:9 aspect ratio, which equates to a value of 1.777.

Quilt Settings by Device

Our different devices have the following quilt settings that are optimal for real-time rendering contexts:

Looking Glass Portrait: 8 columns by 6 rows, 3360 by 3360

Looking Glass 16": 5 columns by 9 rows, 4096 by 4096

Looking Glass 32": 5 columns by 9 rows, 8192 by 8192

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