Volume – The world’s first personal volumetric display (opens in new tab)

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).

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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

They specifically say that it is not.

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

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.

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.

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/

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

And a strong scent of techno-bullshit.

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

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

Hey there --

Full disclosure, I'm working with the company right now. I made the Unity Asset Tutorial Video as well as the rhythm game Rhythm Reach (and am currently taking a break from prepping for our launch party).

Also, take what I'm going to say w/ a grain of salt as I've been working in Volumetrics on and off for nearly 10 years with my personal project Lumarca: http://www.albert-hwang.com/lumarca/ -- so I've been drinking the Koolaid for a while now...

Volumetric Tech is a completely different medium, full of it's pros and cons. Many of the things people are bringing up in this thread are totally true and often infuriating when you start working in this space. You get x-ray vision (for better or for worse). It's impossible to meaningfully document (video always smashes it back into 2d). A focus on voxels make traditionally 2d content a weird problem (like text). And, to be sure, supportive tech for this isn't nearly as advanced as the stuff supporting VR. In terms of engineering, this creates a tough balancing act between price, visual fidelity, and scalability.

So -- why do it?

I do it because it's the only form of digital 3d media that exhibits passive physical presence. It's viscerally present in a way that no other digital media is. When people see a truly volumetric display for the first time (in person), 90% of the time they're totally floored. This is true even of my other volumetric display that had much much worse visual fidelity. The content is "worldlocked" in a very real way.

You also bring up the very real problem of practical applications. We're also exploring these questions (medical visualization w/ DICOM integration, songrams, games?). While this display is far from perfect, we're hoping that the low barrier to entry (a little $ + Unity) + some community presence, we'll make the environment friendlier for finding those solutions.

Anyhow, if you (or anybody on this thread) visits the NYC area, please drop us a note to come by to see it for yourself in person!

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.

Mirrors.