- This is absolutely incredible.
It's like I could reach out and touch it.
Aah!
(glass breaking)
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 sponsors, Seasonic.
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(upbeat music)
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 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
costs a tear-inducing 3,000 US dollars.
And that was for a product
that was unabashedly a dev kit with the usual bucks.
Now, the portrait here is not only 10 times cheaper,
ringing in at $300,
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 USB-C 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 effects,
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 in 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.
(bottle opening)
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 depthiness do you want.
Ooh, that's too depthi, I think.
You can also load in an RGB-D 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 HoloPlay 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 a hundred 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.
(laughs) No, I'm just kidding.
Let's go ahead and open this thing up.
(screw turning)
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 screens.
Oh, hey, how are you doing?
So there's the built-in heat sink for the Raz Pi.
Okay, so that's cooling our CPU as well as our DRAM.
And yeah, okay.
We're going to need a number one.
(screwdriver clipping together)
Now, that's interesting.
Lifting off this thermal pad confirms
this is a two gig Raspberry Pi 4B.
We've got a couple of custom little PCVs 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 daughterboard that's actually,
it's ribbon-cabled on.
Well, good luck everybody.
There we go.
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 daughterboard
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, not, 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...?
- Yes.
- Maybe like firmware, even?
- 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 gotta be, it's gotta be solid state.
I don't know how much else this is going to tell us,
to be honest with you.
- Yeah, cause 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 effects somewhat.
So the actual total thicknesses 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 Raz Pi 4B,
like, I mean, this is a custom board.
What are they doing?
(laughing) 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 in order to run this thing.
I mean, rendering 60 FPS video, that's one thing.
Rendering 60 FPS video for between 45
and a hundred different viewing angles
is a whole another can of worms.
So even though the resolution is relatively low,
it can actually be quite demanding to run.
Just like I demand only the best segues to sponsors.
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(upbeat music)
- If you guys enjoyed this video,
maybe check and 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.
- [Male Speaker] And they've got a new one.
- And they've got a new one?
A new 8K?
- [Male Speaker] It just came out.
- Oh, apparently, it just came out.
Oh, that's the email they just sent.
- [Male Speaker] That's the one.
- Oh wow.
Oh, this is awkward timing.