The Looking Glass Go is a folding holographic display that fits in your pocket

By wazup on December 5, 2023 Comments Closed / 73 views

Gadgets/
Tech

The company is crowdfunding its first pocketable display.

By Sean Hollister, a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.

We’ve been following Looking Glass for years — it’s one of the few startups dedicated to building 3D displays where digital objects appear to live inside or leap off the screen. In 2020, it introduced a cheaper 7.9-inch desktop model at $349, and today, it’s introducing its most affordable and portable screen yet: the $300 Looking Glass Go.

A hand rotates a foldable volumetric display, with the screen tilted up nearly vertically, while the base is flat on a table. The image displays a Star Wars X Wing being chased by two Tie Fighters, including Darth Vader’s Tie Advanced, with green laser bolts seeming to project from the screen as the hand turns it.

The Looking Glass Go.

GIF: Looking Glass

With a six-inch screen that the company claims is 10 times thinner than previous Looking Glass displays, it’s the first one small enough to fit in your pocket — though you’ll need to plug in USB-C power or an optional external USB-C battery dongle, as it doesn’t have a built-in battery of its own. It’s also the first with built-in Wi-Fi (and also Bluetooth) to “receive holograms from the cloud.”

The six-inch screen should have substantially higher pixel density than its 7.9-inch predecessor, too, at a new 1440 x 2560 (491ppi) versus 1536 x 2048 (325ppi). Whether that translates to clarity depends on other factors, too — though Looking Glass says it offers the same 58-degree viewing angles from up to 100 different perspectives as the 7.9-inch model.

(Perspectives: like most autostereoscopic screens, the Looking Glass doesn’t beam a 3D image everywhere simultaneously. Your eyes have to be at certain angles to the screen to see it properly. That’s why some volumetric displays, including 2014’s New Nintendo 3DS, include face tracking, though face tracking can be less desirable when you want to show a screen to multiple people at once.)

A note on crowdfunding:

Crowdfunding is a chaotic field by nature: companies looking for funding tend to make big promises. According to a study run by Kickstarter in 2015, roughly 1 in 10 “successful” products that reach their funding goals fail to actually deliver rewards. Of the ones that do deliver, delays, missed deadlines, or overpromised ideas mean that there’s often disappointment in store for those products that do get done.

The best defense is to use your best judgment. Ask yourself: does the product look legitimate? Is the company making outlandish claims? Is there a working prototype? Does the company mention existing plans to manufacture and ship finished products? Has it completed a Kickstarter before? And remember: you’re not necessarily buying a product when you back it on a crowdfunding site.

The Looking Glass Go is yet again a Kickstarter project, and the pitch is roughly the same as before — it’s a way to see 3D objects without putting on a VR headset, a way to view spatial photos you might capture with your phone, a way to view emerging forms of 3D images like NeRFs and Gaussian Splats, and perhaps even a way to interact with ChatGPT-powered holographic AI characters. You can see one such interaction in the company’s YouTube video atop this story — I’ll reserve judgment until I can try Looking Glass’ “Liteforms” for myself, but it does seem cool!

Looking Glass is invested enough in the 3D content side of things that it’s actually developed a way to view 3D images without a piece of hardware like this, just by dragging your finger or cursor across images on the web. We embedded a few of the so-called “Looking Glass Blocks” into this Verge story.

But you probably wouldn’t just leave a website open on your desk or pop it into your bag to show off on the go. If that’s something you’re interested in, the company is currently offering the Go for an early bird price of $199 on Kickstarter through December 6th, and orders should ship as soon as June 2024.

There’s also a special-edition transparent case version for $50 more.

Image: Looking Glass

Looking Glass says the device is made of steel, glass, and ABS plastic, weighs 235g, measures 0.76 inches (1.9cm) thick, and stands 6.3 inches (16cm) tall and 3.2 inches (8cm) wide. There are forward, back, and pause buttons for slideshows and a 3.5mm audio jack on the side. It doesn’t have a speaker.