this is absolutely incredible
it's like i could reach out and touch it
this is the looking glass portrait if it looks familiar to you that's probably
because we took a look at this technology not that long ago and
promised you'd get a chance to check it out in person very soon the portrait is
finally the first consumer device that looking glass has released following an
enormous kickstarter campaign last year that raised over two and a half million
us dollars and now that these things are getting into real people's hands we're
going to take a closer look at its capabilities
capabilities like showing this 3d logo from our sponsor see sonic never skimp
on getting a quality power supply for your current or next computer build
check out seasonic to find their award-winning power supplies and try out
their wattage calculator to see which one will suit your needs
now it's no secret we're starting to hit the point of diminishing returns for 2d
display technology so what's the next frontier
it's right here the looking glass portrait is a holographic
three-dimensional display that does away with technological limitations like only
working for a single viewer or requiring nerdy glasses to get the effect and guys
it's it's freaking awesome now we visited
looking glass factory out in brooklyn a couple of years ago and took a look at
this same technology back when it was in its infancy back then the 4k developer
kit cost a tear-inducing 3 000 us
dollars and that was for a product that was unabashedly a dev kit with the usual
bugs now the portrait here is not only ten times cheaper ringing in at three
hundred dollars but it's gotten some major improvements since we last saw it
compared to the first generation the highly refractive block of material
that's in front of the display has been completely axed thanks to a new lens
design this gives it way more depth to
your eye and makes the whole device thinner and there's more horsepower
under the hood including the ability to run headlessly thanks to the integrated
raspberry pi 4 which by the way actually makes up the majority of the thickness
of the device at the back here the display and lens stack are just
millimeters thick on their own with this kind of illuminated frame thing not
actually being integral to its function while the raspberry pi 4 and the custom
display management at the back fill out the rest of the metal case on the right
side you've got three capacitive touch buttons for toggling through your
hologram library as well as playing and pausing and then down below those are
two momentary buttons and an indicator led for power and display status off on
the right side there's usbc for power and data HDMI in and a headphone jack so
that you can pipe audio out to external speakers not that i would necessarily
recommend sitting and watching movies on this thing
and there's a little foot that clips on the bottom as well as a quarter inch
thread if you want to put it on a stand and that's about it it's i mean it is
just a display after all but like look at it
the thing is usually we don't have any way of showing you guys this kind of 3d
effect thanks to your flat youtube compressed viewing experience but
because the portrait uses a lens system rather than polarized glasses like a
theater or individual screens like in vr
the parallax is visible anywhere within its 58 degree viewing cone so we can
just move the camera or the device around and see our image from new
perspectives do you guys remember those like kids hologram books or like
bookmarks and stuff like that well those are called lenticular books and
basically it's a plastic screen filter over top of an image that only displays
part of an image underneath from certain angles well fundamentally
that's how this works but instead of it having two or three or
maybe four angles the portrait can do up
to 100 angles at once which makes it
appear much more seamless as you're moving around as impressive as the
hardware is the real wizardry and the labor room creating this is the software
that goes with the looking glass portrait the primary tool is the
holoplay studio so let's fire that up and also hydrate from
my lttstore.com water bottle
there are four different ways that you can load in a hologram if your phone has
a depth sensing camera like the iphone 12 pro then you can drop a portrait mode
photo in and you can make something like this one
in a flash and this is really cool after
the fact you can actually adjust the focus and the i love this depthiness of
it depending on what looks good to your eye let's see how much depth venus do we
want that's too depthy i think you can also
load in an rgbd photo or video so it has
half RGB pixels and half depth pixels
a quilt photo which is a compressed looking glass factory light field image
format where many views are arranged in a specific way to fit the display and
finally a light field photo set which is
essentially an array of bullet time style photos once you've got all the
photos and videos you like you just press sync playlist and it'll wipe out
anything that's already loaded in standalone mode and replace it with
whatever you've got in holo play studio now here's something that i don't really
have an answer to right now the portrait can display a variable
amount of lenticular viewing angles between 45 and 100
just how that is done i'm sure they would never tell but it's
got me curious are they displaying at 100 angles all
the time or are they just up sampling 45 angle content are they
digitally adjusting the lens somehow we don't really know and the assembly is
actually specifically calibrated on a device by device basis so we don't have
a way to find out without potentially ruining it
so i guess we'll just leave it be then
no i'm just kidding let's go ahead and open this thing up
i guess we didn't really talk about the wall mounting option earlier so you can
also wall mount it so we've got these four
screws oh you oh hey how you doing so there's the built-in heat sink for the
raspi okay so that's cooling our
CPU as well as our dram and
okay
we're gonna need a number one
got it now that's interesting lifting off this thermal pad confirms this is a
2 gig raspberry pi 4b we've got a couple of custom little pcbs
here that route power and HDMI over to the front of the device none of the
other inputs are used though because that's where this comes in
we take out these two screws and we can remove this hat daughter board that's
actually uh it's ribbon cabled on well
um good luck everybody there we go
okay that's kind of crazy so this is like a solid
40 bucks worth of hardware on this built-in computer for what
you would think they would want to make as bare bones as possible since it's
just a display but you can actually see this daughter board is bigger than the
motherboard yeah so plugged into the usb port there's a 16 gig little sandisk
storage so they curiously are just using off-the-shelf usb drives for the onboard
storage instead of soldering it right to the board i mean that that's a good
thing and then there's actually an ARM processor right in the middle here hold
on a second there's two 16 gig storage modules in here there's a 16 gig micro
sd as well i didn't even notice
what are you why one must be file system
yes and the other would be maybe like firmware even yeah
what we don't know is the exact way that these two boards each with their own
storage and processing share the various tasks but what we do know is that
there's clearly no digitally controlled lens it's got to be
it's got to be solid state i don't know how much else this is going to tell us
to be honest with you sort of splitting the display away from the lenticular
layer yeah because the whole like it looks
thicker than it is this is not anything this is just like a front illumination
thing that makes it look cool they could have absolutely made this thing thinner if they really wanted to although it
might hurt the effect somewhat so the actual total thickness is like
this that's pretty cool i'm surprised at how low the markup is on this thing i
mean i know it's 300 for like a six point whatever inch display but
that's that's a 2k panel capacitive buttons there's 32 gigs of storage on
like off the shelf micro sd and usb sticks a raspi 4b like i mean this is a
custom board what are they doing
they're having fun they're having fun you know what
i respect that even though there's not a whole lot in
here in terms of expensive hardware for the price
for the amount of development work and how niche this thing is it honestly
looks like a pretty compelling value for the right customer which raises the
question who is that exactly
i mean i could see people buying something like this as a flex tier photo
frame to have on their desk then i could see a smaller subset of
people that might use it for actual work like maybe you want to preview your
designs that you create in unity or
blender or something like that just you know right on your desk without having
to put on a headset but maybe i should just let you guys tell me
are you the kind of person who needs this product
and if you are something to watch out for is be forewarned you're going to
have to have some serious GPU grunt in order to run this thing i mean rendering
60 FPS video that's one thing rendering 60 FPS video for between 45 and 100
different viewing angles is a whole other kind of worm so even though the
resolution is relatively low it can actually be quite demanding to run
just like i demand only the best segways to sponsors what you think you don't
need a website of course you do it's easy to make and you can do almost
anything on it using squarespace they have award-winning templates that will
help make your website stand out instead of looking like it's from the 90s if
you're looking to open a business online selling products they have you covered there too squarespace can help you
showcase what you're selling in a modern style with inventory management and no
limit on how many items you want to sell even we use squarespace both our Linus
media group and ltx expo websites were built quickly using squarespace and if
you ever get stuck they have a 24 7 support team ready to help you out so
head to squarespace.com LTT and you can get 10 off today
if you guys enjoyed this video maybe check a look at our looking glass
factory tour where we checked out some of their more commercial oriented
solutions the big one that runs at 8k
absolutely mind-blowing and they've got a new one a new 8k
oh apparently it just came out oh that's the email they just sent
oh wow this is awkward timing