Episode 3: No Dystopian Future Here: Looking Glass Factory Creates an Immersive Experience Without the Isolating VR Sets

Behind-the-scenes at the offices of Looking Glass Factory, and a conversation with CEO and Co-founder Shawn Frayne.

In Episode 3, Lux Capital Managing Partner and Co-Founder Josh Wolfe sits down with Shawn Frayne, CEO and Co-founder of Looking Glass Factory. Watch the entire episode above, and what follows is an edited version of the interview transcript.

Josh: Hey everyone. I’m Josh Wolfe, managing partner and co-founder of Lux Capital, a venture capital firm that invests in emerging science and technology ventures at the outermost edges of what’s possible. And this is our new series, Futura, where we’re gonna introduce you to the rebels of science and invention who are turning Sci-Fi into Sci-Fact. Today we’re sitting down with Shawn Frayne, CEO and founder of Looking Glass Factory, which is building holographic displays for the future. We’ll take you behind the scenes to show you how the company is pioneering full color 3D holographs without the need for AR or VR goggles or headsets.

Josh: So when I think about Looking Glass, it reminds me that the gap between sci-fi and sci-fact is always shrinking. And this is straight out of Princess Leia’s scene where she is encoding a message in a hologram in Star Wars. What was the inspiration for you to start this?

Shawn: Yeah, I think Princess Leia on that scene in Star Wars was the inspiration for a lot of folks chasing the dream of the hologram. For me, it was actually the shark that gobbled up Marty McFly in Back to the Future II. And after that moment I was hooked on trying to figure out whether or not it was possible to make that dream of the hologram real.

Josh: Technologically, this is pretty sophisticated stuff. How does it all come together?

Shawn: The Looking Glass is technically called a light field display with volumetric characteristics, but what that really means is we’re producing a multitude of views of a three dimensional scene every 60th of a second. The Looking Glass itself produces 45 of those views of the three dimensional scene, sort of in a fan-like arrangement. And the eyes of everyone gathered around a Looking Glass are getting exposed to different perspectives of the three dimensional scene in the Looking Glass. And those are so tight together that you don’t perceive any break between them. So it’s exceeded that threshold of believability that by analogy, animation did a hundred plus years ago where it transformed something from a collection of pictures to once you have more than 12 of them every second it becomes a movie.

Josh: Now, the near-term use cases, I’ve seen some incredible artwork and a real creative genius that has been expressed through this medium. What are some of the use cases that you’ve been most excited about in the near term?

Shawn: So around 30% or so of users are starting to create something that we and the team think of as the software robot or the Holographic Avatar. In some cases that’s an avatar software robot that you can interact with in some way, speak to, and in some cases folks are experimenting with adding voice AI to those software robots that run in their Looking Glasses.

Josh: Help me imagine the far out applications. You know, we’ve talked about being able to sit together in a room and actually see the pitch on a soccer field or football field and watching the game there just out of, again, Star Wars. What are some of the fanciful far out potentials of this?

Shawn: We have a lab in Hong Kong, that’s where we do our hardware and we have a lab in Brooklyn where we do most of our software development and we always have a challenge communicating between the two teams. In the near future we can have a large version of a Looking Glass that fills up a portion of the wall or maybe the whole wall and I can holler and say like, “Angus, come on over here” and I see him walking in from the light field fog and within the Looking Glass range, there he is. And I walk up to it and we have a conversation as if he was really just down the hall, but he’s across the world.

Josh: So forget about telepresence, robots with a two dimensional screen. It’s almost like teleporting into a holo box that somebody is physically standing in, which would be pretty amazing.

Shawn: Yeah. This is all physically possible and we’re pushing hard on this. There are already folks in the community that have prototyped realtime communication with their Looking Glasses just over the last month or two. So this is going to happen.

Josh: What is the emotional experience that you want a user to have when they sit down in front of a Looking Glass?

Shawn: Well, the Looking Glass is designed for groups of people and without any friction. So you don’t have to put on a VR headset, you’re instantly able to see a virtual three dimensional world right there sitting on your desk with your friends or family or coworkers. The emotional connection that we’re aiming for, and I think we’ve achieved in some cases, is for the hologram that’s in the Looking Glass to feel like a real object to that group of people. If it’s an apple inside, you feel as if you could reach in to the Looking Glass and grab the apple.

Josh: Amazing. Now at Lux, we love when our scientific founders are these rebels who sort of break the laws of physics of what conventional wisdom thinks is possible. As you’ve been developing this, is there something that you have run counter consensus to, something where everybody else didn’t think was possible. And you guys have invented around it?

Shawn: There are three things. The first is folks told us not to enter the display industry at all. Startups don’t get into this trillion dollar race. The second is a lot of folks were entering VR and AR five years ago when we started, and I took a lot of calls with folks who said, that’s the future, what you’re doing in light field and volumetric display, isn’t it? That’s changing now. But that was the consensus at the time. And the third is whether or not a light field display that someone could purchase for under a thousand dollars was even possible. A lot of the folks who got into VR and AR headset land want the hologram in the way that we imagine the hologram to be this group viewable experience. But they didn’t think that that could come to pass in the next 50 years. So we pushed hard against that. And here it is.

Josh: Shawn, I love the future you are inventing. Thanks for being here.

Shawn: Thanks, good to see you.

Josh: That’s it from us today. I wanna thank the rebel scientists and inventors of Looking Glass Factory for giving us a sneak peek of the future. And I want to leave you with two scenes from sci-fi films that inspired Shawn and us. The first, is Back to the Future II which is Shawn’s favorite scene when the holographic shark freaks out Marty outside the Holomax Theater and the second, is Ironman II. There’s a great scene when Tony Stark is manipulating full color holograms and they come closer to reality than the writers ever imagined. If you wanna get in touch with us, reach out at futura@lux.vc. We’d love to hear your crazy ideas and inspirations.

This episode’s sci-fi recommendations:

Films Back to the Future II and Ironman II