But while he isn’t selling those displays at a loss, he admits his 50-person company isn’t yet profitable, and he believes holographic software could become a second “flywheel” to grow the business. ( The NFT community seems particularly poised to embrace something like Blocks.)įor those who do have an actual Looking Glass display - it’s a product we’ve been following for years, watching as it morphed from a large box to an open prism to more of a box again and, most recently, a small vertical display designed to let you see your portrait mode smartphone photos in 3D - Frayne suggests his holographic displays will be the best way to view Blocks for some time to come. “There will of course be some elements of this that are paid,” says Frayne, adding that he’s hoping to have conversations with creators during the pilot program about how monetization might work. “I think we all know what isn’t fun about the current internet”īut Looking Glass is planning for this to be a business and not just a way to sell more of its holographic displays, of which there are now roughly 20,000 in the world. “If this is as big as we think it’s going to be, the carrier of the transition from flat-land 2D to 3D, it’s our responsibility to try as hard as we possibly can to avoid some of the mistakes that have happened in prior transitions.” this is an opportunity to do something different,” he tells me. “I think we all know what isn’t fun about the current internet and the pressures that’s created in the world. Frayne believes the strength of Blocks is in spreading them across the open web, but he’s also clear that Looking Glass will be the one hosting the content - so Blocks are a little bit more like a YouTube embed than a GIF or JPEG that you can host anywhere.ĭoes that mean we’ll end up watching pre-roll ads, like YouTube, before we can see the holograms? I pressed Frayne on this, and he wouldn’t rule it out - only that he sees his company as a better steward than, say, Meta. But the one thing I can’t figure out, and I’m not sure Looking Glass has figured out, is the business model. In case you hadn’t picked up on it, I’m pretty excited about all of this.
Over time, Looking Glass says it’ll expand to “C4D, Zbrush, Procreate, nerfies… even iPhone and Android portrait-mode photos.” (I’d never heard of a nerfie before, but they seem pretty cool.) Frayne says the company has even prototyped holographic video content where you could, say, watch a stereoscopic 3D trailer for the next Avatar movie on the Avatar homepage and get multiple perspectives on the action. The company does have plug-ins for Blender, Unity, and Unreal, but Alex had to submit his work to Looking Glass itself for final mastering, and the company would only do that part of the process off the record. Things like “user-friendly documentation” are still on the roadmap, I understand. It’ll hit open beta this summer.įor now, 3D-to-Block conversion is a bit of a process.
So, today, the company’s opening a pilot program where 3D creators can sign up to turn their content into Blocks, starting with items created in Blender, Unity, and Unreal. “We really believe this is the missing element,” says Frayne. Here’s the HTML we used for Alex’s art, for example, which lives in a simple iframe:Īnd here’s a link you could share anywhere on the internet:
Just text someone a link or embed an HTML code block in your website, and they can experience it, too. What potentially makes Blocks special, though, is that they live in a container that can scale to any device of any resolution anywhere - and be shared just as easily.
It’s built on web standards so you can view them in any modern web browser, much like a GIF or JPEG. That’s why his holographic display company is introducing the Looking Glass Block: a new image format that lets you peek inside a 3D scene, even if you’re viewing it on a normal flat screen. He says that if you add up all the CG movies, video game screenshots, 3D models, and portrait mode photos - and, yes, NFTs - there are hundreds of trillions of pieces of 3D content that we only ever experience in 2D. “Imagine we’re in a parallel universe and every movie ever shot was shot in color, but every human being was watching in black and white,” says Looking Glass co-founder and CEO Shawn Frayne. Now, a company called Looking Glass is trying to make holograms effortlessly portable, too.
The incredible portability of the late Steve Wilhite’s “graphics interchange format” made it the perfect canvas for viral memes. On June 15th, 1987, CompuServe introduced the GIF, a way to share images - or animated sequences of images - anywhere.