hey everybody its norm from tested and I want to introduce you guys we may have
known him from past videos as Alec Hornstein from looking-glass factory how
you doing Alex I'm great how are you I'm doing great and it's
always great to have you guys here in our studio I know you're in town for
augmented world expo is of course the holographic devices and displays you
guys make would be perfectly suitable for that so yeah if you guys don't know
out there no looking glass is not only the name of the company but name with a
product that you guys launched a year ago and that's this right here this is a
little glass that's right this is looking to us now you did a Kickstarter
successful and what's the status for this do people have it and what are
people doing with them yeah so it's really exciting so we started shipping
these in December and these got out into the world and now there's thousands of
these in the world and that's kind of this creative community of everyone from
game makers animators CAD modelers there's this whole community of people
who are creating 3d works that go in here and now that we have this community
a lot of what we do in lookingglass is support them we integrate with more
software we'd find ways for people to get their stuff in here and make it look
good and we help distribute that so we start seeing stuff that people have
never met have made and that is in the looking glass and I'm really and not
just a couple things like every week there's more more submissions that come
through and we distribute those through this this stuff what we call the library
mmm and so it's a combination of just
captured stuff and also rendered objects and just different things that you had
no idea that people would be creating for for this display for this light
field display that's right like we've seen everything from storytelling where
people are making animated shorts that play in here I saw the first person cry
watching a story in here which I didn't expect but it I was like oh my god like
somebody emotionally connected enough with a story being told in a hologram
like that brought them to tears that's wild I mean we so often think of you
know the displays we have as windows into some digital world whether it's a
computer monitor or even the like the VR headsets that we have but this the form
factor that you guys ended up on it works as a window if people want to but
works as kind of a box that captures an environment you can put entire stage
stage exactly and are you finding people using it as how we talked about last
year where people are rendering designing things on on a connected
computer and dragging it over this being kind of like the way to view 3d without
having to put on a headset as well totally so and sometimes it's not even a
drag over like if someone's working in unity or someone's working in blender
what they see as they're designing or making an animation that that scene
shows up in real time here so let's say I'm putting lights into a scene I might
use a leap motion and move my finger around and child a light to my fingertip
so I can move it around and place it and just hit like space that's where I want
to like that's where I want to light right and I feel like I'm having a 3d
interaction in a 3d world that's like I'm putting it into a small stage that
I'm setting up yeah and then we also see people make really lovingly made
animations and renders and scenes that don't work in real time because these
are these are done like very very carefully and meticulously but they look
beautiful like it looks like there's a real object in here a real scene playing
out in here I mean the thing that we have on here will get some different
angle is for it is a perfect example that because you have the shadows are
using the dimensions and the kind of a frame aspect of the device to then cast
the shadows in lit in the right place so it looks like there's a cold fish
swimming around and not only is it interactive what I love is that it's
it's shared and communal right you can pull people over and work together
within the field of view of this seeing the same 3d object yeah I mean this
one's by kuduro Takahashi who works at unity in Japan and he puts out these
amazing open-source projects that are visually stunning and kind of on the
very cutting edge of what you can do in 3d and so this was one of our we we
looked at this in the looking-glass way oh my god it feels like it feels like
it's here yeah it's wild I can't wait to other people do with it
but you're here to show off something new so at Aqua Net World Expo you guys
are in availing a new product that's this here what's different about this
device that's right so this is the pro and
and the pro is if you look at this this is really a creator system we designed
it because creators have their own laptops they have their own hardware
that they like to work on and we said we don't want to fight that we want to work
with whatever you've got this looks like a monitor plugs in over USB and HDMI and
you work on your own laptop but you have this whole setup whenever you plug it in
it's hard to take around it's hard to just like plug in a wire and have it do
the thing and so this is the first system that is really integrated into
one unit it's an all-in-one setup so the computer is in there in behind the frame
behind the glass you have this secondary display which looks like it's a way to
interact with with Windows and load up animations is that touchscreen as well
yes so both these are touchscreens this is touchscreen previously there were
things like you plug in motion right and that's now integrated yeah so in this
case this is a touch screen that lets me do kind of the gestures were used to on
a 2d interface like a phone where I can do pinch to zoom I can drag things
around I can do kind of your basic translate rotate scales how everyone is
very accustomed to working in with 3d environments on a phone it's built into
the bezel on to the bezel got it and this is just a traditional screen with a
touch screen on top but that lets me do again like things so this was a demo
that we built with some partners called ortho science and this one lets me
switch from here's here's a patient's mouth without where teeth are crooked
here's what that looks like corrected and going from another info
dense 2d display and bringing up a certain a particular scene in 3d that
correlates with that show me in the design of a mobius strip inverted that's
super cool and having this interface than the gates having a laptop interface
nice interface and you're building things that are framed for this aspect
ratio as menus yeah that's right so this is more for you're gonna build a single
application on here and you want that you want to deploy it to here so you
want something this is just gonna stand alone and play that one application
over and over and over if you want to develop you pull up your laptop you plug
in your HDMI from your laptop and it automatically detects Oh something else
is connected here and it just acts like a second screen so you can develop on
your own machine and then you make a build put it on here and it's ready to
go what type of computer are you putting in here and what's necessary to run all
those views for your light field yeah so it's the guts for gaming PC so inside
there's an Intel supernote and it's very very similar to the guts of this like
kind of mid-range gaming laptop so it's between like Nvidia 1050 1060 graphics
card mm-hm and that was just from a lot of testing
of seeing looking at framerate looking at capability on the apps we have right
now and saying okay this is this is gonna do a good job running a broad
broad spectrum you want your uni live you and of course if you want your
preventive stuff that's gonna be fine as split up those music exactly and join
them up two other things have you guys experimented on this obviously there's
the the pre-rendered stuff with this like this is nicely nicely pre-rendered
what's the state of like light field like video yeah so we've been doing some
work with a partner that partner called kendo which is really really interesting
so they've been building some really fascinating 3d capture software and your
capture software and cameras and one of theirs that we thought was kind of an
amazing fit in lookingglass universe is this this camera they built that is
what's called a 3d 360 camera and so that in this case here's somebody
looking at a reindeer farm what this does is this capture is a full 360 view
with a depth map so that lets me take that 3d world that this camera saw and
this is a still image this camera saw but it lets me pull it in here lets me
zoom through and yeah the parallax gets retained those are no you're kind of
changing your focus your telephoto telephoto distance that's right and
similarly like look at that same idea works on on 3d scenes so on 3d video
rather so this one is the same idea but shot in video so
this is lets you take record videos pull it out and from us we saw this this
camera has originally developed for a VR pipeline
it was meant to stream to people and so they could look around in in a headset
and be comfortable with some little bit of lateral movement right a little bit
of lateral yeah because if you have 360 video or 180 stereo video it looks 3d
but any type of kind of movement like this doesn't translate it starts to
break and so what we saw that we're like oh this this actually there's this
content out there there is ways that people are filming and producing and
broadcasting that content and it works it works great in VR it also we can pull
it into here and so that was one of these kind of neat interplays between
the two areas I mean the best kind of pop culture
analogy would be like the you know the Minority Report where like Tom Cruise in
there and he pulls up that vacation footage and you have basically flat
video that's overlaid on top of the geometry that's right and filling on the
sides and this is kind of like the first steps toward that they have to fill a
little bit of the sides you know but it's it allows for comfortable viewing
across different angles that's right it's exactly right and it's I feel like
Minority Report it's always one of the pegs we have of like oh yeah like that's
actually tech that exists right now and they're just framing it as here's what
its gonna look like in the future yeah at least the capture tech we didn't have
this hologram displays yeah so that's the the current version of looking last
movie last Pro for holographic displays this is this gonna be another
Kickstarter is it something that people can just buy in order you can just buy
it so the deal is this is there so it's going for going on sale awwe and really
it's this is it's this with the computer as an all-in-one setup so for display
applications if this is going to go into a business if this is gonna go in it
like enterprise application it's this is the easiest thing to deploy um and yet
going going on sale this weekend that's very cool what's what's next for looking
glass to know me you guys always thinking ahead has iterated a
holographic display for so long you know last time when Sean was here estimate
could this scale up and and big and and you know what does it take
to get more more views and a wider viewing or higher resolution you guys
still experimenting and prototyping we always are so we one of the things
people always ask is like how big can it get yeah and so the first thing we did
is we worked out some software so we said like okay let's say we we built a
way in our SDK to tile but cross looking glasses and that lets us build just by
taking like multiple ones of these we can build little lookingglass display
walls and they have a seam inside but that lets us start to experiment and
show and talk to interested partners and say alright here's what this looks like
if it's a 2 by 2 array and if people say that's great how do you get rid of the
block we say well let's look at making that um and those are things that we are
working on all the time and similarly looking at different ways of capturing
light fields different ways of displaying information how do I capture
3d info with my phone like almost all new phones have some type of stereo
camera in the back yeah that captures depth information that's amazing that I
can capture a shot and have it in here in a second like that's a wild thing
right um the front-facing camera on this phone for example lets me shoot video
like depth video that's amazing so there's lots of ways that are there's
lots of things that are on the cusp where there's existing technology that
has 3d sensors and 3d capability and we're working on ways to integrate that
in here for communication for entertainment and and for work and all
these are really kind of wonderful to play with it's very it's so very much
it's these new kind of these new areas that are coming up that we love and as
you said you can also pick e back on development and investment in AR and VR
and that content now can also work here right if it's outside of headset yeah
it's amazing like there's a lot there's kind of this wave of work around 3d in
all kinds of things like phones shoot with stereo cameras because they make
they can artificially blur the background and make pictures look
crisper and nicer it just so happens that thanks because all phones do this
we also have a way that all phones catch 3d info that we can use yeah and so
these are areas that I think are really compelling like we any anywhere where
there's like this big cluster of people working from different angles on 3d it's
a really wonderful place to play because there's stuff that happens that we
didn't make happen but that we can we can work with it really is the type of
device that I need you guys watching it through you know the lens of a a 2d
video but that you when you see it in person you just get immediately and I
hope that people out there have a chance to see the looking glass in person
because you have kids run up to it and interact with it and it just they it's
intuitive because it is how you perceive light feel to how you perceive the real
world that's right that's what we and that's what we hope for is just playing
with how people see the real world and making something that feels like it's on
the table in front of you making like a bringing of impossible universe into the
room with you well thank you so much outs for coming by and giving us a
preview of this I'll have more information on these products in the
description below more coverage of tech like this in the future
and until then we'll see you next time you visit yeah sounds great I can't wait