looking glass factory started out with little 3d art pieces that were made by
gluing together thin slices of acrylic to create a 3d object that's useful for
you know visualizing an organ for a medical student or as like a you know
kitschy desk ornament but that was never their endgame so in principle the goal
was pretty simple instead of using ink to create static images they would use a
field of light to create moving ones
but in practice going from this
to this was anything but straightforward
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like any stereoscopic 3d display a looking glass needs to show an image
from at least two perspectives to create the sensation of depth in the movie
theater this is done using polarized projectors and lenses and in a vr
headset it's done by physically separating the images that are sent into
each eye but both of these techniques have limitations a 3d film for example
can only be viewed from a single vantage point you can't you know move your head
around to see a sticker on buzz lightyear's shoulder and a vr headset
well it's not easily shared with a friend or a colleague
looking glasses technology by contrast allows a group of people as many as can
fit in about a 50 degree cone coming out of the display to view and interact with
3d objects and renders in real time it requires no eyewear and allows each
user's perspective to individually change as they move their head around
within the viewing cone so you guys can actually see
this aspect of the effect on camera even
it's it's super trippy it's like i'm holding
this frog right now don't worry i'll be careful with it and whether we're
looking at the two and a half k or the 4k dev kit the most striking thing about
the looking glass is how real the objects inside appear to be
because here's the thing on a 2d display every pixel shines with a given
intensity and color but through a looking glass the light also has
directionality to it so this sophisticated slab of optics actually
splits the otherwise totally normal display underneath into 45 different
perspectives that means that as you move
left and right each eye is grabbing the
image from a different point of view and
the light reflections off of the objects in the looking glass actually change
realistically and again that is on a per eye basis this comes at a significant
cost to image fineness because only one
out of every 45 pixels of the display can be allocated to each perspective
but it works quite a bit better than you'd think because the 3d effect and
the better lighting realism increases the perceived resolution and so does the
way that looking glass actually splits each pixel into the individual rgnb
subpixels before mapping them to the
various perspectives as you guys can imagine the processing involved in
rendering a scene even a simple one like this algae demo that was created in
unity from 45 different perspectives is
not trivial and the gtx 1050 in this gaming laptop is working pretty hard and
we're still not getting a locked 60fps
so these experiences are pretty good but
looking glass even though they've actually shipped thousands of these dev kits hasn't considered either of them
good enough to slap their company name on it and fully productize it
that comes in a moment this
is the looking glass 8k and this thing
absolutely has to be seen to be believed
now as before it takes 45 pixels to
create a single pixel from all 45 perspectives but guys when you're
working with 33 million pixels instead
of just 8 million it gives you a ton of different benefits
first and foremost of course is that you get a much finer image i mean the dead
kits are impressive but when i walked into this room my eyes just about popped
right out of their sockets this 3d model
of a person's face is crazy lifelike and once we swapped it
out for a 3d scan of a real person
removing some of the uncanny valley effect it got even more convincing
another benefit is that they actually needed far fewer optical tricks in order
to create the 3d effect so this slab on
the front of the display is much thinner than the dev kits see a big chunk of
this was actually used to pull the image
up away from the actual display to deepen the focal point which is the part
of the image that appears to be in focus to your eyes on the 8k
that's no longer necessary and again thanks to the additional resolution it's
possible to have objects sink into the display and even appear to be
popping out of it with much much greater clarity like this
you can't really capture it on camera but in person the effect is
shocking and impressive and what's really cool about it is it's
surprisingly comfortable to look at in spite of the fact that i showed up here
jet lagged and with a bit of a headache i didn't experience
any of the discomfort that i feel with something like a nintendo 3ds or the
nausea that you experience when watching vr content that's not at a very high
refresh rate and during this demo we also got a really good look at the
appearance of apps before they get moved
over to the looking glass so i was able to get up close and see some of the RGB
subpixels that are clearly in the wrong place like a very bright green pixel
that's sitting in a dark mountain range that must need to be remapped somewhere
else so this whole process of
remapping subpixels needs to be done extremely accurately and every finished
display actually needs to be calibrated to account for tiny discrepancies in the
manufacturing tolerance of the optics so that information then gets stored in the
display kind of like a digital
fingerprint the rest of the processing though is done by the pc so believe it
or not most of the engineering work that gets done here is actually software
engineering they've got sdks for unity and unreal engine they've created useful
little tools like a 3d mouse cursor that allows you to use a simple regular mouse
to select or focus on 3d objects with a 2d input device and they've got a 3d
model importer so that anyone can grab a model out of a repository and view it
and of course many of the demos that they ran
focused on what they expect people to actually do with these things in the
real world medical applications both for students and practicing doctors are
basically limitless and i was blown away by how
different it was experiencing this tour of the house through a looking glass
compared to just looking at it in 2d like i really felt like i had a great
sense of the scale of the space to walk around in and that's without putting on
a headset or even glasses i mean
architectural firms design firms they're going to be all over that because you
can sit with the client and look at it and interact with it without you know
any weirdness as before it's 45
rendering passes for every one of these demos at 8k
so as you guys can probably imagine this one ain't running on a laptop and if the
temperature in this room is anything to go by the rtx 2080 ti in this system is
working pretty hard so hard i even had to remove my LTT
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two of the most mind-blowing demos for me personally were this render of some
cartography tools where as you move your head around the magnifying glass here
actually works exactly the way you'd expect and
this recording of one of looking glass's developers that was taken on an azure
connect so you can see there's actual
depth to her face and you guys might not realize this but odds are if you have a
recent model smartphone you are carrying a depth sensing camera around in your
pocket so with display technology like this and depth sensing cameras we're
talking real time holographic video
calling that's crazy now there are some
blind spots in this image because it was taken with a single camera from a single
perspective but that's something that could be overcome pretty easily by just adding a
second camera and a little bit of real-time software stitching
not crazy like guys the future is now
now thing is to own the future you're gonna have to dig pretty deep because
even the 4k developer kit is three grand
and the price for the 8k looking glass is uh
contact us so basically if you have to ask
you probably can't afford it so unless you've got a commercial reason for
buying one your best bet is probably to try to find a demo to check out because
it is worth seeing in person it sounds like the easiest place to do that is
going to be ces 2020. this video is brought to you by drop.com the cost gmr
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this headset we're gonna have that linked below by the way guys make sure
you're subscribed to Linus tech tips because our team's going to be out there at ces 2020 this year covering all the
hottest new tech that we didn't get a chance to go and scope out before the
show starts like looking glass also if you guys enjoyed this video like
subscribe and all that good stuff massive shout out to looking glass especially sean for spending time with
us today and giving us a chance to be one of the first to see this incredible
technology