Tech Briefs Magazine - March 2021 - PIT-18

TECHNOLOGY LEADERS Cameras & Imaging Systems

Figure 3. A team sharing a 3D view of a molecule model. (Image courtesy of Looking Glass Factory)

make applications for the Looking
Glass. And really dense LCD and OLED
screens that we can modify optically,
electrically, and with software.
Although, we think this will define the
next generation of how people will communicate and interact with information,
there's nothing complex about the core
thing we're doing. You can think of our
system as a lensing-based, refractive
optics-based system. We assign a given
subpixel to a certain direction in space,
then we just update that full set of 100
million points every 1/60th of a second.
Take the coffee cup I'm holding in my
hand. To me, it feels very different from
the way it would look to you on a 2D display. The light bouncing off the ceramic
of this cup is bouncing not only with
intensity and color but also with directionality. That directionality impinges
my eyes in such a way that I can deduce
that it has some 3D characteristics to it.
But, even more than that, I can see specular reflections and other details that
the real world has, that you simply cannot reproduce in a conventional display.
What happens in your brain when
you're looking at our display, is close to,
although not yet identical with, the exact
process it would go through in order to
deduce three-dimensionality in the real
world. While we do pay a lot of attention
to the power of stereoscopy, that is not
the only thing that conveys three-dimensionality to a brain. Other key aspects
like depth of field, specular reflection,
and so on, go into making up what
makes an image feel real, in addition to
purely left-eye right-eye stereoscopy.

Figure 4. Holographic view of an automobile design model. (Image courtesy of Looking Glass Factory)

breaks that have been characteristic of
the prior generation of auto-stereoscopic displays, where you would have a
small discrete number of views.
We designed the Looking Glass so that
anything it shows looks real. It comes
down to a combination of hardware and
software that's fully under our control.
We design all of our driver boards, all of
our own optics, everything except for
the original source of the pixels and subpixels. Our hardware modulates the
light from the underlying pixels and
subpixels. We also designed the software
that lets us faithfully display this universe
of 3D content, whether it's a holograph-

ic map, or a CT scan, or in the near
future, a light field video feed. So, by
adding directionality to each of the subpixels of our Looking Glass systems, we
add a spatial sense to the interface in
addition to the temporal effects that
have been worked out over the last 100
years in the development of cinema.
We have been able to develop our display because of all of the modern technology that is available to us. There are
super-fast computers that can generate
the intensity, color, and direction of 100
million points every 1/60th of a second.
There are game engines like Unity and
Unreal that we can plug into so folks can

Tech Briefs: Can this be done with
pictures of actual things or just with
images one creates on a screen?
Frayne: It can be pictures of real
things. You could take a number of photographs of a real thing and then pipe
those through our software - the thing
could be static or moving. But a lot of
what folks are doing with the Looking
Glass is based on synthetic, rather than
real-world information. Real-world tools
that would capture volumetrically or
with light fields are not yet fully available. However, there are millions of folks
who every day go to work and manipulate a 3D model of some sort.

Photonics & Imaging Technology, March 2021

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Tech Briefs Magazine - March 2021

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