Holograms Display

Looking Glass

Another industry that is breaking the real time 3D interactive media is the holographic displays. Back in 2014, the Looking Glass team based on NY created a desktop portrait holographic display that uses a multiple 2D images and multi view techniques to construct 3D models inside a light field display achieving the long dream of non headgear 3D virtual visualization.

Looking Glass Portrait features two primary modes of operation: Desktop Mode and Standalone Mode. By plugging the device into your computer (Mac or PC) via a standard USB-C and HDMI cable, you’re able to use it as a secondary 3D monitor. You can then use the HoloPlay Studio software to easily drag and drop new holograms onto the device, develop applications using plugins for programs like Unity and Unreal Engine, and more.

How the Looking Glass Works

In order to produce holograms, Looking Glass provides up to 100 discrete views of a 3d scene and presents these views over a view cone roughly 58° wide. This arrangement of views tricks the visual perception system into seeing 3D objects in two major ways:

by changing the user's aspect on the scene as they move their head around it (parallax)
by presenting different perspectives to each eye (stereo vision)

SDK and other Plugins

Looking Glass SDK Bridge is a library that integrates custom engines based on OpenGL and DirectX to render the scenes in the holographic display. Additionally, It has the necessary API calls to the input system to make the 3D content fully interactive. This allows any user to control elements in the scene as they will do on any 3D desktop and VR application. Follow the guidelines on how to properly set the resolution of the images for optimal results.

There is also Unity 3Dk, Unreal Engine and Paraview (VTK) plugins to import applications built on these engines into the glass block . This facilitates the work for 3D designer and content creators with no code experience.