Received my LookingGlass holographic display from backing it on Kickstarter (the only hardware Kickstarter I’ve tried), and immediately fell in love with it.
It’s hard to do the device justice with a online video, since it only captures one perspective, but when seeing it in person it has a strong immediate 3d effect with each eye seeing a different angle. It’s really incredible to have this AR-like stereo display with no headset needed.
The night I received it I was able to get my NvidiaFlex based fluid project running (after only about 3 hours after downloading the Unity SDK!)
Received my holographic display from @LKGGlass last night and got my fluid physics project working! Really impressed by how good this feels with the @LeapMotion pic.twitter.com/PXzXQD9VmP
— Lee Vermeulen (@Alientrap) December 11, 2018
Main thing I had to do was rewrite how the LeapMotion handles hand/finger physics, so it could properly collide and push the fluid particles. After that setting up the project was mostly just getting the scale right for rendering/physics:
A test I did a while ago: made the @LeapMotion finger tracking physics based, so virtual hands are stopped/pushed back by objects. Was absolutely needed for interacting with the fluid sim pic.twitter.com/vmIoK9ffqR
— Lee Vermeulen (@Alientrap) March 1, 2019
The amount of fluid particles shown in the video appears to be the limit to get over 20fps on a my 1080 gfx card, so there is definitely a high rendering cost to generate these light field images. I think at the moment the LookingGlass SDK is just rerendering the same scene 48 times per frame (each at a different angle). Hopefully in the future they could at least speed this up using the same techniques that were used for single pass stereo rendering with VR headsets.
Maybe as a future option holographic display could use head tracking to limit what angles are rendered? Would need to be able to track multiple users at once, but could mean needing to render only 4 times rather than 48, and would also mean a lot less bandwidth / higher possible resolution.
Hopefully this fluid app (which I am calling ‘Slime&Stuff’) should show up in the LookingGlass app library soon!
As a (pretty pointless but fun) experiment I also added a HTCVive tracker to the display to have positional/rotational tracking:
Another vid of the tracker+Holographic display – showing the positional tracking with a stationary model pic.twitter.com/EUVpmmsUbx
— Lee Vermeulen (@Alientrap) December 17, 2018
If these displays were easily handheld (right now they are pretty massive/heavy), having them tracked would be a great way to have multiple people interact with the same 3d space without requiring a AR/VR headset.