Looking Glass Factory: Inside Holograms Production

Introduction and Career

My name is Shawn Frayne, and I’m the CEO of Looking Glass Factory, a team of game developers, 3D artists, optical engineers, electrical engineers, and inventors. We’re bringing on the new age of media one hologram at a time with our line of holographic light field displays called the Looking Glass.

Personally, I've been obsessed with holograms ever since I first saw that hologram shark try to swallow Marty McFly outside the Holomax Theatre in Back to the Future II. I was so obsessed that in high school, my Dad helped me build my own holographic studio in my bedroom. 

That dream of a holographic future never was far from my mind, so about five years ago a group of folks and I set out to make that dream real.

About the Looking Glass Factory

I co-founded Looking Glass Factory along with my good friend Alex Hornstein back in 2014. We’ve grown seemingly exponentially in five years, and now have a business with headquarters in both Brooklyn and Hong Kong, all working together to make the technology of holographic displays accessible to the world.

We currently offer three different Looking Glass products: the Standard and Large Looking Glass are both developer kits that make creating 3D content in a program like Unity of Unreal Engine seamless. With these two Looking Glass devices, 3D enthusiasts can showcase their creations and make them viewable to groups of people at the same time without needing a single piece of headgear. 

We also recently debuted an all-in-one holographic workstation called the Looking Glass Pro. This system is meant to help enterprises showcase 3D assets in a way that makes pitching, selling, and displaying more compelling, comprehensive and profitable. 

This might come as a surprise, but there are already thousands of Looking Glass systems sitting on desks around the world and we're working 24/7 to keep up with demand.

The Technological Approach to Holograms

It’s been a long time coming, but the Age of the Hologram is finally here. We’ve seen multiple iterations of what folks call holographic displays, but never before has there been a device that gives groups of people the ability to view and interact with genuinely three-dimensional virtual worlds without the use of any kind of AR/VR headgear.

I look back on how people have historically communicated ideas with each other and shared stories. And I see things like a group of people gathering around a campfire, or a family listening to a ballgame on the radio together, or neighbors huddling around a television set to watch the moon landing. That group experience is what I believe holographic displays can bring to the next generation of media and that's what we are focused on doing in Looking Glass Factory.

Challenges of building holograms today

Films are great for inspiration, as they challenge our ideas of what can and cannot be. There have been instances of holographic movie moments (like R2-D2 projecting a self-contained light-field) that are simply not possible physically (can't stop light in mid-air). However, there are many more films like Minority Report, Big Hero 6, and Her, where representations of holographic displays are not only possible but are actually being used by thousands of people every day right now.  Yes, with their Looking Glasses. 

About Superstereoscopic Displays

Arguably, the most versatile systems within the broad "holographic" category, superstereoscopic displays (also known as light-field displays) present a myriad of genuinely three-dimensional perspectives to groups of people through a dynamically-generated synthetic light-field. Typically, no moving parts, headgear, or tracking are needed.

These displays work by emitting a vast quantity of light rays with careful attention paid to the direction of those rays. Where a traditional two-dimensional computer monitor might present a single view or perspective of a scene, a superstereoscopic or light field monitor can present dozens or hundreds of perspectives of that same scene simultaneously.

This approach has the ability to represent anything real or digital (objects, people, etc.) with extremely high three-dimensional fidelity, but at a price. Because of the vast amount of data involved in pulling this off, tremendous computational power and very high pixel densities are typically needed. These requirements are part of the reason that this technology is only now beginning to come to market with first-generation systems like the Looking Glass.

The Production of Holograms

Since launching the Looking Glass we’ve seen so many incredible and creative things come from our community of 3D artists and developers that have shown us that there really isn’t one singular way to build a hologram. It’s important to us that there are as many ways to build and create as possible, which is why we’ve built our software tools to support programs like Unity, Three.js and Unreal Engine. 

We’ve also seen holographic voxel games and a myriad of 3D scans inside the Looking Glass. Time and time again it’s proven that in the age of the hologram just about anything is possible.

The Use of Holograms in the Future

Communicating with someone on the other side of the Earth, or even in a galaxy far far away in the future, is going to become real. Holographic CT scans are going to become real, and you’ll be able to review medical information with a doctor inside a holographic display before undergoing a procedure. Holographic family movie nights, where we can watch our favorite Pixar characters come to life inside a holographic display will be coming to a living room near you much sooner than most folks think.

I think it's important when embarking on a venture like this that we carefully consider the impact we’re having on our fellow humans. That's why our organization Looking Glass Factory prides itself on making digital content that focuses on human connections, and in that sense, we are hoping to stave off a technologically dystopian future. I'm talking to you, Mark Zuckerberg.

Shawn Frayne,  CEO of Looking Glass Factory 

Interview conducted by Ellie Harisova