Volume – The world’s first personal volumetric display

Volume – The world’s first personal volumetric display(lookingglassfactory.com)

58 points by bahro 9 years ago | 56 comments

tobr 9 years ago |

Despite them doing their best to cover it up with quick editing and cherry picked angles, it's clear this has very low depth resolution and foggy picture quality.

If this only uses light, how would it deal with occlusion? It would be impossible to put a dark object in front of a lighter one, right?

dezt 9 years ago | |

I am on the Looking Glass team on Volume. I can answer you.

As far as resolution: each slice is about 104px high resolution in it's current state, the width is about 1500px in resolution. The current depth resolution is 10. Because Volume currently has 10 slices. We do use some tricks to reduce the apparently low depth resolution, for example we allow a dev to set settings to 'overdraw' the slice so slices draw parts of their sister slices, which are then blended/interpolated with shaders. It helps a lot, and in fact our tests with more slices don't seem to do much other than increase the quality and viability of wider viewing angles. At near straight on viewing angles (within 15 degrees of the center), more slices don't seem to affect the quality of the display much (interestingly).

As an additive display, you are correct, a dim object in front of a light one wont show well... it really does look a lot like 'princess leia' in the 'obi-wan come help me' scene.

There are 2 ways we found to mitigate this. 1) We allow devs to set a 'black point' which adds the desired value to all geometry, thereby having a way to distinguish 'black' from 'void'. 2) Certain applications benefit a lot from not rendering slices at all but drawing everything as a normal 3D scene and then using a shader reading the depth buffer to determine the slice of a particular pixel - hence anything in front of something else causes a 'shadow' in subsequent slices (so it -CAN- occlude in this way, but by sacrificing the view from the back side). Things like scanned human heads look very good with this method... they honestly look like ghost heads suspended in space inside Volume.

Anyway, I hope it answers your questions. (I am the main tools dev).

tobr 9 years ago | | |

Thanks for the answers! I think it looks like interesting tech and it could be fun to play around with it, despite the limitations.

But I really think you should reconsider the messaging around the product. I'd imagine most of your potential customers would be tech-savvy enough to ask the questions raised in this thread. Right now your marketing material is making us suspicious; it looks like you have something to hide.

I think you'd be much better off if you were transparent about the technical limitations, so as not to be mistaken for another Cicret Bracelet (https://youtu.be/KbgvSi35n6o). Getting that out of the way would allow you to focus your story on the possibilities, why this tech is cool (because it is!).

Also, judging by your description some of the material on the site is very deceptive, such as the animation with the horse. It appears to be very high resolution, there's no "slicing" even at acute viewing angles, and it has dark objects occluding lighter ones. That's not really OK.

cma 9 years ago | |

Yes, kinect 2 has around 200,000 pixels from the depth camera (512x424). I believe they said this thing only has 3,000,000 voxels. That's like 145x145x145. Barely enough to have a few voxelized Windows 3.1 desktop icons bouncing around.

It definitely seems like just something cool to have sitting around at this stage, like a lava lamp or something.

As long as they can keep improving the res, it could eventually be useful, but will they get there before unobtrusive AR glasses?

Retric 9 years ago | | |

~1500px X 104px X 10px which probably is enough to be interesting and of course this is a gen 1 device. I suspect bandwidth is a major issue as this is already close to 1080p pixels.

TeMPOraL 9 years ago | |

I suppose it is possible but you'll get additive blending. It'll look unrealistic, but sometimes that's a feature.

shultays 9 years ago | |

It says "2 million 3d pixels", which is pretty low in my opinion too

iamleppert 9 years ago |

They say it's not a parlor trick, but it's nowhere near true holography or anything like it. True holography records the object's wavefront as a flat interference pattern, encoding the phase information from the object (and also creating a very precise model of its surface), creating a diffraction grating which can then be used to replay the identical wave when illuminated by a suitable reference source of light.

This is the only known way to create true images with real depth of field and parallax, and requires ultra high resolution to both record and display the microscopic interference pattern.

There is a good book https://www.crcpress.com/Ultra-Realistic-Imaging-Advanced-Te... that has the mathematical basis for which the real principle of holography could be applied, given a capable enough display technology, to re-create an exact replica of the light field/wavefront that is identical to what we see in real life. Of course, a single static image with sufficient resolution of about 3"x5" in real life contains over 100 GB of data. The information carrying capacity of light is amazing.

None of the current VR/AR systems (including MagicLeap) use anything close to what is required, and we are still ways off in both display tech and GPU bandwidth to even generate a single, static image in a consumer product.

Animats 9 years ago | |

There's a small company in Austin, Zebra Imaging, which generates CG holograms on big pieces of photographic film.[1] Those are real holograms. The military buys them as 3D models in a flat, portable form, and they're sometimes used in place of architectural models. Some people still take photographic holograms using a big flash laser. (This was a thing about 40 years ago. One guy still does it.) Almost everything else called a "hologram" is about as fake as a "hoverboard".

Someday someone may make a display with light-wavelength-scale resolution and display real holograms in real time, but that hasn't been done yet.

[1] http://www.zebraimaging.com/

amazon_not 9 years ago | | |

I found this interesting. Too bad the prints are like $250/$500 each depending on whether they are monochrome or color. Wasn't easy to find out either, what with their expired webshop domains and all.

anotheryou 9 years ago | | |

They look pretty good with the right lighting, but objects must never be clipped by the papers edge. So you have to keep your 3d inside an imaginary pyramid on top of the medium.

achr2 9 years ago |

I saw a comment today on HN showing voxiebox[1] which seems to have a better volumetric display, unlike this one which has a very small number of discrete layers.

[1] http://www.voxiebox.com/

Animats 9 years ago | |

Looks like that has about 20 layers. The flickering suggests a mechanical scanner. A rotating mirror? Vibrating mirror?

achr2 9 years ago | | |

I think it's a spinning plane with a projector beneath. Their limitation is in the DLP projector's refresh rate. Seems they also may have extra limitations in colour space, since most DLP projectors use a rotating colour wheel.

joezydeco 9 years ago | | |

Looks a front-surface OLED display that's vibrating up and down on its Z-axis very fast.

So the number of layers would be bound by the frame rate of the display, the amount of vertical travel, and the speed of the motor driving it up and down.

iLoch 9 years ago |

I'll start by saying this is a really interesting device, and a very impressive technological feat. However, I have some major criticisms too:

The only advantage I see to this vs. something like HoloLens is that it doesn't require a head mounted display. Unfortunately for this project, that's not as big a barrier for serious companies as they need it to be. In time I think this "advantage" will also dwindle due to shrinking component size, etc.

The price is also considerable - it's about a thousand dollars cheaper than a HoloLens (I'm going to keep going back to HoloLens because to me they're directly comparable.) But the thousand saved also comes with some significant drawbacks:

- The notion of collaboration seems to be non-existent with this device - I don't see them showing how that might work based on their promo clips. Seems to be single user driven.

- It has a back-face. How do you render something like text so that it's readable from all perspectives?

- Control appears to be limited with no standard input. HoloLens tracks the users hands, by comparison.

- Does it have a top on it? At that point, what really separates it from a 3D TV? Seems like you'd only get limited perspective translation.

I'm having trouble coming up with really practical applications for such a device, that wouldn't be better suited by a head mounted personal device. I fully support the effort if they find their niche, but coming from a VR/MR point of view, I can't really see any real advantages. Please enlighten me! I don't mean to be a downer!

Animats 9 years ago |

The description is rather vague. It claims 2 million voxels and no moving parts. That's resolution of maybe 200 x 200 x 50; the depth dimension seems smaller than the others. Is is some optical system which projects on 50 plates (maybe less), or something like that? It looks like they're somehow optically remapping a projector to multiple planes at lower resolution.

There have been depth displays before - vibrating mirror devices (a mirror mounted on a subwoofer driver) and such. Today we have enough GPU power to drive a volumetric display, at least at the modest resolution of this device.

But it's awfully low-res. Once you get tired of the 3D effect, it's going to be painful.

nom 9 years ago | |

If you look at the rendering of the device in the video [1], I think it's pretty clear what they are doing. The device has a projector at the bottom that projects onto 10 angled surfaces that scatter the light in all directions. One row of pixels in the projector maps onto one row in one of the layers (or maybe they use the display columns, which makes more sense resolution wise). You can even see the angle of the surfaces in the image.

[1] http://imgur.com/a/qmz0f

rosalinekarr 9 years ago | |

The resolution does seem super low, but I think they're trying to target the low budget market where it might make more sense. Their "How It Works" page says this:

> Volumetric displays have been around in research labs and a few small companies for decades. But they have always been extremely expensive — a staggering $100,000 per unit.

> Volume is nearly 100x less expensive than the systems that have come before.

Of course, their lowest price point is still $999, so I still wouldn't call that cheap.

achr2 9 years ago | |

I think it only has 10 plates.

I like the 'More 3D than that Tupac hologram' claim - it's true, but it uses basically the same effect, just with 10 layers.

joezydeco 9 years ago | | |

You can see 10 layers when the cube rotates at 0:40 in the video.

trothamel 9 years ago |

It would be interesting to find out what the dimensions of this are in voxels. The 2 million voxels makes me think this is based on a 1920x1080 projector.

A graphic on https://www.lookingglassfactory.com/how/ showing the obligatory macbook has its display divided vertically into what looks like 10 slices - so perhaps 1920x108x10?

That would seem plausible as to what the photos on the site represent, but some of the 3d renders use a much higher vertical resolution for the display.

(This is just an educated guess, of course.)

diimdeep 9 years ago |

awful pacing in video, 70% of time is headlines 10% is something else, 20% actual device, and even that is cut in super small sequences. instant ADD

Pitarou 9 years ago | |

And a strong scent of techno-bullshit.

Kenji 9 years ago | |

Not to mention that it should contain an epilepsy warning before it starts. The screen flashing and how it's done is very unprofessional.

Pitarou 9 years ago |

I believe the video is mostly concealing one important fact: the resolution in the z-axis is very low. That's the only way to explain the fairly high-res images in the demo when there are only 2 million voxels.

I'd guess the device is made of something like 20 stacked panels, each with a 300 x 300 resolution.

DougWebb 9 years ago | |

On some of the images you can see the layers; it looks like there are 10 of them. So the resoultion is more like 600x330x10.

mpolichette 9 years ago |

This is cool, can definitely see this getting better over time, it cool to see a new approach to display.

mikejmoffitt 9 years ago |

Fun idea, but the resolution is absurdly low, and as an emissive display it won't be able to block light (show dark things) without trickery or some drawbacks (like tinting the view glass, or requiring all lights to be off).

"people of all ages can come together to experience something that’s future AF."

Is the target audience "gullible ass"?

mistercow 9 years ago |

I was hoping to learn a bit more about how it works. They hand-wave about "lightfolding", but what does that mean?

Animats 9 years ago | |

Mirrors.

vorotato 9 years ago |

This will have niche application until they improve things. Pretty neat though.

ChristianGeek 9 years ago |

Why would I choose this over VR?

Zikes 9 years ago | |

Only one person at a time can use a VR headset, and they can get a bit cumbersome.

glibgil 9 years ago | | |

Two people can use two VR headsets

goranb 9 years ago |

Pepper's Ghost display?

achr2 9 years ago | |

I think it's a very similar effect, except the 'reflection' surface is also the projection surface, across 10 panes. They've also obviously used some interesting optics for projection surfaces. Might be light guides.

sp332 9 years ago | |

It looks like multiple such displays stacked up, for true depth. Each of your eyes will see a slightly different image because it has real parallax, and each person around a display will see from a different angle too.

mistercow 9 years ago | | |

"Multiple pepper's ghost displays stacked up" doesn't really make sense. Pepper's ghost requires a lot of space, and it isn't really stackable.

DanBC 9 years ago | |

This appears to stack a bunch of displays together, so not pepper's ghost.

mobiuscog 9 years ago | | |

Pepper's Ghost(s) ;)

mistercow 9 years ago | |

They specifically say that it is not.

jdennaho 9 years ago |

This is differentiated from 3d projection onto a monitor or vr headset how?

alfanick 9 years ago |

don't ever mess with my scrolling experience