We’re Off to See The Wizard
— The Wonderful Wizard of Pros.
ICYMI: just two months ago, a few of us from the team made our merry way from Brooklyn over to Santa Clara for one of our biggest expo presences ever: AWE 2019. Flanked by a gigantic neon sign of our logo (which has recently found a new home in our new lab), we used this incredible event that brought together thousands of people (from AR/VR/MR/XR/ALL THE REALITIES) together in one space, to launch a brand-new product that we lovingly call the Looking Glass Pro: A Holographic Workstation.
The Looking Glass Pro?
The Looking Glass Pro was born out of this idea that some of our enterprise customers were looking for an all-in-one holographic display solution for groups of people to view 3D content without VR or AR headsets. This version of the Looking Glass is a self-contained holographic interface that ships with a powerful suite of software tools licensed for commercial use including our powerful HoloPlay Unity SDK, HoloPlay Plugin for Unreal, and the HoloPlay.js three.js Looking Glass Library. By self-contained, we mean that it can run complete standalone because it actually ships with a built-in Intel® NUC 8 VR NUC8i7HVK computer. The Looking Glass Pro will allow companies to generate holographic applications in the fields of 3D design and simulation, volumetric and 360 3D video capture, architecture, medical visualization, education and experiential marketing.
Standing apart from its predecessors, the Looking Glass Pro features a touch screen on the display itself…a Looking Glass First! It also boasts an additional 2D foldout touchscreen that gives users a super neat way to interact with additional 2D UI content that might be needed to live alongside the 3-dimensionz. Just like that, the future is so close, you can actually touch it.
She ships!
Anyway, all this to really say that the first batch of Looking Glass Pros starts shipping out to customers today, just a mere 7 weeks after its first announcement. Mazel-Tov! We’re excited to work closely with our first batch of — *ahem*— Pro customers and deliver top-of-class holographic experiences with them.
Siggraph 2019
Now did you think that we’d let a blog post go by without mentioning how you — dear 3D human — could see one in person? Not a chance! Shawn and a few others on our team will be making a quick pit stop at Siggraph in LA this year. Though we won’t have a booth of our own this time, we’ve found some very friendly friends (we won’t tell you who they are but they have all the I-N-T-E-L) to let us show off some really cool 3D content at their booth #1217. Additionally, Shawn will be part of the Intel Exhibitor Session: Creators Meet Technology.
First up: time for some Summer Lovin’ with Grease 360. First shown at CES earlier this year, Randal Kleiser, director of the iconic 1978 Grease movie and Diego Prilusky, Intel Studios’ GM, filmed a group of 20 dancers recreating one of the movies most memorable musical numbers, “You’re the One That I Want,” at Intel Studios in LA. Captured by the studio’s 96 high-definition 5K cameras, the dance scene will come alive as a volumetric video that enables viewers to experience the content from any given point of view. Interact closely with the characters by way of touchscreen. Oh yes indeed.
Second: Runnin’ by Reggie Watts. Though not exactly a music video, Runnin’ is something between a virtual space and what some others have described as an “MC Escher dance party, a teleportational dance floor of the future”. Runnin’ is developed using Intel Studio’s Point Cloud data, and results in a similar volumetric video format that you’re able to experience in 3D inside of a Looking Glass Pro.
If you’re around LA this week, come by Siggraph! Email bizdev@lookingglassfactory.com to get in touch with us or just leave a comment on this post and we’ll be in touch.
To the future!
