Backers, To The Future
about 3 years ago – Fri, Feb 19, 2021 at 09:46:31 PM

Great Scott! A not-so-short but incredibly sweet update incoming. 

It's a big day for us here. After crossing all our t's and dotting all the i's, we've officially sent out surveys to all 8,051 Looking Glass Portrait backers. All of you reading this should have now received an email from BackerKit with a request in kind for your shipment details. If your inbox looks empty, head on into your spam inbox or email us at [email protected] so we can double-check this for you and send you your survey manually if need be.

We are looking to confirm shipping addresses at least one month earlier (in some cases a bit longer than that!) to make sure we leave enough time for fulfillment, sorting and any transit issues— please make sure to enter an address where you will be receiving your unit(s) in April - June 2021 and onwards.

Note: not all units will be shipping out in April — this is the earliest we will start fulfilling orders but depending on what your pledge level is, units will ship out according to the [original ship date + 4-6 weeks (due to some of the delayed Raspberry Pi 4 shipments from our last update)]

... and if you were wondering... Yes! The literal Looking Glass Factory is all set up with our team working around the clock (socially distanced & on reasonable shifts) to assemble Looking Glass Portrait units for you all :D

Some Details

Backerkit: Add-Ons

The Add-On section is where you'll find individual and bundle-priced Looking Glass Portrait units and accessories available to purchase in addition to your existing pledge items. The special backer-only add-on prices will be available until February 26 only so act fast if you want to get ahead of these prices.

• Additional Looking Glass Portrait units are $229 (ships June 2021)
• Additional 2-Pack Looking Glass Portrait units are $399 (ships June 2021)
• Additional 10-Pack Looking Glass Portrait units are $1,999 [FREE SHIPPING] (ships June 2021)
• As part of the Add-Ons, we’ll be offering our new cloud-based service to convert 2D → 3D. These conversions are priced at $20 for 100 photos and $150 for 1,000 photos* .
    *(To be doubly clear, most of what you can do with Looking Glass Portrait is free and comes with your reward. This is an additional service we’re providing for those of you who might want to have archival non-portrait mode photos converted and so you should only purchase this if you are wanting to convert 2D, non-Portrait mode photos, into 3D. If for any reason you have questions about this, feel free to write us at [email protected].) 

Tax & Duty

As mentioned during the campaign, Looking Glass Factory is responsible for all taxes and duties for shipments within the US. Backers outside of the US will need to arrange and pay for VAT, customs and duties themselves (where applicable).

Digital Items & Licenses

At no additional cost, backers can add on:

• A Record3D License**
• A Voxatron License

** As a reminder, Record3D only works with iPhone X, 11, and 12 models & iPad Pro models. Please only request for a Record3D license if you own a compatible device.

These licenses will be fulfilled through the email address used for your BackerKit account after your pledge is complete and the fulfillment will be arranged for April 2021.

Two-Pack Looking Glass Portrait Shipping Refunds

During the campaign, we shared that with some of the countries (GB, EU & Rest of World), we calculated shipping costs for the 2-Pack reward tier incorrectly. We managed to fix this for the BackerKit survey so you'll have the corrected shipping costs if you decide to add that on during the survey. 

However, for folks who originally backed this reward tier, and are shipping to these destinations, please expect a note from us as we'll be processing all refunds in one go after all of the surveys have been filled out.

Final Note

As a final reminder, the due date for filling out your survey is February 26, 2021. Surveys not completed in time may affect the shipment date of your pledge.

Of course, we also understand that life does not always go as planned so if you're unable to fill in your shipment address right now, please email us at [email protected] with your Backer # and we'll try to make other arrangements.

Advance Beta Backers & Hologram Collectors

A few weeks back, we sent out our very first round of surveys with some of the earliest test units being sent out. Here's a very close estimate of what your Looking Glass Portrait will look like on arrival — replete with holographic foil.

In addition, we've also sent out a small handful of Hologram Collector Bundles — of which includes this very special laser-etched plate that includes the signatures of the team that worked on the Looking Glass Portrait launch (Above image, right). 

 I could go on about all the things our team is actively working on right now but I'll save that for our next update. If you have any questions at all about this process, have some feedback or run into any issues, write us at [email protected] and we'll get you sorted.

And of course, it goes without saying, we are SO EXCITED (!!!!!!!!!) to get your Looking Glass Portrait units to you — I promise it'll be worth the wait.

To the future!

--- Nikki (aka Discord Ninja nikkimouse &VP of Customer Experience)

Important Shipping Update
over 3 years ago – Thu, Jan 28, 2021 at 01:37:56 AM

Dear denizens of the third dimension,

Today we’re unfortunately announcing that the main production batches of Looking Glass Portrait systems will be delayed by 4-6 weeks.

This is primarily the result of an unexpected change to delivery times on the Raspberry Pi 4, the small computer built into the heart of each of our systems. We didn’t see this one coming and take full responsibility. We’ve shipped thousands of systems over the years, always on time, so this is something we take very seriously.

There are a few factors contributing to this delay, the main one being that the recently increased lockdowns in the UK, where our Pi 4s are being made, have forced a major backup in Pi 4 production, impacting our large order of Pi 4s placed in early December. Backup options for the Pi 4 that we had in play (some at substantially greater cost to us) informed us a few days ago that their delivery times have also now shifted by a month or so. So it seems this is a supply-chain-wide event.

This means folks should expect that all reward tiers will be shipping out later than originally planned. If your reward tier was originally scheduled to ship in March, it will now ship 4-6 weeks later; if your reward tier was originally scheduled to ship in April, it will ship 4-6 weeks later, and so on. This shift applies to the main reward tier as well as the add-ons. This does not impact Advance Beta or Collector Bundle shipments, which will go out on schedule.

Aside from this snag, the rest of production is well underway and we will continue to push ahead at full speed so that when we receive the missing components we can get the units out the door and to you. We will use any extra time to run additional quality tests on your systems so that when you do get your Looking Glass Portrait, it will be everything you were hoping for in your first personal holographic display.

Please let me know if you’ve any questions in the comments below or write to [email protected], which will go to me and a few other folks in our team. I know this is not the email you wanted to see today, but rest assured the holograms are coming -- just slightly more in the future than we’d like.

-Shawn & the Looking Glass Factory team

p.s. For those of you wondering when we’ll be collecting your addresses, be on the lookout for an address survey going out in a couple weeks. For Advanced Beta backers, you should be getting a survey for your shipping address in the next 48 hours.

Here, There, Holograms Everywhere
over 3 years ago – Thu, Jan 07, 2021 at 01:33:56 AM

Hi everyone! We've three major announcements today so I'll get straight to the point.

1. Do Androids dream of holographic sheep?

Thanks to all of your help with test photos from dozens of different Android phones over the past few weeks, we've determined which Android phones can capture Portrait mode photos with depth of the quality necessary for great holographic images. So at long last, we can share that these Android phones will be supported at the same level as iPhones* in our software in a free update shortly after shipments go out:

• Most of the newer flagship Samsung phones, including A7, A9, S10, S10e, S9+, S20, S20+, S20 Ultra.
• Some of the Huawei phones with "Aperture" mode, including Mate 20, Mate 20 Lite, Mate 20 Pro, P20 Pro, P30 Pro.
• Newer Pixel phones, including the Pixel 3, 4, and 5 models. 

Generally the newer the phone, the better the depth maps and consequently, the better the holographic photos that will result.

We'll likely be expanding this list as we test more phones, so please don't hesitate to let us know if your phone isn't in this list in the comments below.

*As a reminder for iPhone folks, the iPhones models that we will support are Phone 12, iPhone 12 mini, iPhone 12 Pro, iPhone 12 Pro Max, iPhone SE (2nd generation), iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, iPhone 11 Pro Max, iPhone XR, iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, iPhone X, iPhone 8 Plus, and iPhone 7 Plus

2. Any 2D Image can now be transformed into a holographic photo 🤯

That's not a typo -- you read that right. 

Any 2D photo, including scans of childhood photos, the thousands of non-Portrait-mode photos you might have in your photo album, and even many images from the internet, can now all be transformed into a super realistic three-dimensional holographic image in your Looking Glass Portrait. 

As one example of many we've been playing around with in the team over the holidays, here's a scan my Mom made of a photo from my 3rd birthday party, with a depth map generated by this new process and then turned into a hologram via our HoloPlay Studio software:

 We've toyed around with this sort of thing for years and the results were never at the level necessary for public release, but we recently started working with a partner that's pioneered a powerful new process for deducing high quality depth maps from 2D images, and now we're excited to bring that capability to you and your Looking Glass!

Any 2D photo will work. This includes:

• Not just Portrait mode photos -- which of course can be converted using HoloPlay Studio for free --but now even non-Portrait-mode photos taken with any phone can be turned into holograms
• Old childhood photos, e.g. a digital picture or scan of a physical picture as noted above
• Comic book illustrations
• Almost any image from the internet, like this one :)

 You'll all be able to start experimenting with this when you receive your Looking Glass Portrait systems in March and April, first on our website and then in an update the second half of the year as a premium feature in HoloPlay Studio. There's no programming required to do any of this - it's fully automated and takes just a few seconds per photo.

Note that this is a cloud-based service, so it costs us money to operate. Even so, we want to let y'all try this for free. That's where the new stretch goal comes in!

If the Kickstarter campaign reaches $2.5M by January 14, all backers will get your first 20 conversions for free, with additional 2D to 3D conversions priced at $20 for 100 photos (can be added as an Add-On).

This is a major breakthrough and all of us in the team are so excited to be able to get this to all of you!  

 3. Live demo in an event Thursday at Noon ET 

For those of you who want to see some unbiased third party perspectives on what we're building, some great reviews of Looking Glass Portrait have come out in the past few days, including this review of a beta system by Norm at Tested and this review by Jeremy Horwitz at VentureBeat. 

But I know some of y'all still have questions and want to see more of what the Looking Glass Portrait can do live. That's why we've put together this event happening tomorrow (Thursday) at noon ET. 

This event is short and sweet (30 minutes), free, and thanks to the power of the interwebs, it has no limit in participants so I hope to see you all there!

And for folks in other timezones that don't want to watch me talk holograms in the wee hours, indeed this event will be recorded.

I know this update was a bit long, but it's really just the tip of the iceberg. So many more wondrous things are in store and I'm excited to continue to share the growing capabilities of Looking Glass Portrait with y'all in the coming weeks!

To the future!

-Shawn & all of us here in Looking Glass Factory* 

*yes, it's a real factory now - production is starting! More on that soon :)

Happy new year, it's event time!
over 3 years ago – Thu, Jan 07, 2021 at 12:49:33 AM

Backers! Hope y'all had a wonderful holo-day and happy new year to you all. I come bearing a brief but exciting update. This Thursday (January 7th) at 12PM EST, we’ll be hosting our first virtual event of the year — Secrets of the Looking Glass Revealed: This Time It’s Personal. You’ll be hearing from Shawn where he’ll be taking you through some live demos and giving everyone a closer look into some of the Kickstarter add-ons. Tickets are f r e e and you can RSVP for the event here.

If you have any questions you’d like us to answer, please drop a note in the comments below and we’ll try to answer as many as we can on the day. If not, we’ll make sure to follow up on all of them after Thursday.

Hope to see you all very soon!

- your friendly Program Manager, Janet

How we invented Looking Glass Portrait
over 3 years ago – Wed, Jan 06, 2021 at 11:37:55 PM

Friends of the third dimension!

Over this whirlwind week since launching Looking Glass Portrait, I've had countless questions about how our team pulled this off; how long we'd been working on the technology; and why I am personally so obsessed with holograms.

So, by popular demand I'm reposting a lightly edited write-up I did about my own lifelong quest to see the holographic future realized and how our team of misfits ultimately pulled off the impossible.

Let me know if you've any questions or thoughts to share in the comments below, or directly write me at [email protected]. Thanks for making this launch something beyond all expectations, please continue to spread the word over the remaining month of the Kickstarter campaign, and, as always, to the future!

-Shawn

Note that I originally published a version of this on my blog, but there are about 6,424 more people here than subscribe to my personal blog , so I am reposting here :)

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“If everything moves along and there are no major catastrophes, we’re basically headed towards holograms.” -Martin Scorsese

When I was in high school, my dad and I built a holographic studio in my bedroom. I scrawled “DANGER! LASER IN USE!” on my bedroom door and got to work. After six months of dead-ends and hours sitting quietly in a laser-filled room waiting for the holographic glass slides to expose, I had it — my first hologram.

I remember pulling that holographic slide of Mickey Mouse out of the vibration-isolation sandbox at the foot of my bed, throwing open the front door and running into the street holding this glorious creation from the third dimension over my head. No one was out to share in this momentous occasion — it was the middle of the night in suburban Tampa, Florida after all — so I did a lap around the cul-de-sac on my own, quietly yelling in celebration at this hard-won achievement.

Only extreme fanatics really thought you could make holograms of any sort back then. Even the holograms we could make were the equivalent of, basically, laser photographs. And so, the dream of holographic display was firmly relegated to the imagined futures of sci-fi movies for another 20 years.

Fast forward a couple decades to 2014. A small group of misfits and I founded a company called Looking Glass Factory to prove it was possible to make a real holographic display. We wanted to create a device that could generate living, dynamic, computer-controlled holograms — the technology of our dreams that would conduct fields of light in just such a way as to open up a three-dimensional window into another world. One that we could look into together without needing VR goggles or AR glasses.

After creating hundreds of prototypes, by 2018 we’d cracked the core technical problems and started shipping the world’s first holographic display dev kits to thousands of hologram hackers around the world. Holographic displays weren’t just a dream from sci-fi movies at that point — they were something real that we used every day.

Even so, holographic displays were still a medium that only specialists could really use. And that’s never been the end goal. I’ve always wanted a way for everyone to have their own holographic display. That’s why launching Looking Glass Portrait has been so significant to me personally.

As everyone reading this knows, Looking Glass Portrait gives you the power to capture and create holograms of your own for the first time. This is in some ways a bet that the killer app of the hologram isn’t a game or scientific visualizations or 3D spreadsheets — it’s people. This is all a dramatic acceleration of our original game plan and, of course, COVID played a defining role here.

Back in March 2020, just a week before the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic, I published a post called “The Killer Apps of the Hologram”. In it I listed Machines, Maps, and Medicine as the likely first killer apps of this new interface. And then at the end of the post, almost as an afterthought, I added a fourth item: Memories.

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[March 5, 2020] Out of the four first killer applications described in this post, the capturing and replaying of holographic memories is probably the furthest from becoming widespread, primarily because it has a dual dependency on both display and capture technologies. But it’s the closest to my hologram heart, so I’m shoving it in here as a stretch contender. The realization of this dream is actually why I co-founded the company Looking Glass Factory in the first place..

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It’d be an understatement to say that COVID-19 reordered that priority list. Everyone we cared most about was suddenly just a little rectangle on a screen in endless Zoom meetings, remote birthday parties, and the occasional awkward Google Hangouts happy hour. As the world locked down, the most important things in the world became how to better connect with one another, and how to better remember those moments from the Before Times.

On this backdrop, our team at Looking Glass Factory accelerated development of a skunkworks project we’d been quietly working on: a radically low-cost holographic display with the display of holographic people and characters at its core. This new system would leverage the latent depth capture capabilities of new phones and would have a new standalone mode, meaning the system could run holographic media without being tethered to a PC or Mac.

When we started, we didn’t know if any of this was possible. And even if it was technically feasible, it was still a couple years of work that we would need to pull off in six months. This meant we had to iterate on new prototypes of the critical hardware and software at a furious pace, dropping prototype packages in the mail and into a constant circulation of Ubers and Lyfts that seemed to be fine transporting our prototype packages around Brooklyn without passengers.

But the team pulled off several miracles, invented a number of brand new technologies along the way, and somehow it all came together.

This is part of a major shift underway of a magnitude similar to the shift from photographs to film or radio to television, and that’s the shift from flat media to holographic light field media.

The release of Looking Glass Portrait is meeting a moment where millions of people are finding they have 3D depth cameras, some even with LiDAR capabilities, in their pockets in phones they already own.

For that reason, combined with all of your support during this first week, it feels as if this time holograms are here to stay.

— — — —

Inspired by movies in the 80’s and 90’s, the author Shawn Frayne has been reaching towards the dream of the hologram for over 20 years. Shawn got his start with a classic laser interference pattern holographic studio he built in high school, followed by training in advanced holographic film techniques under holography pioneer Steve Benton at MIT. Shawn currently works between Brooklyn and Hong Kong where he serves as co-founder and CEO of Looking Glass Factory.