 Looking Glass Factory started out with little 3D art pieces that were made by gluing together thin slices of acrylic to create a 3D object. That's useful for, you know, visualizing an organ for a medical student or as like a, you know, kitschy desk ornament, but that was never their endgame. So, in principle, the goal was pretty simple. Instead of using ink to create static images, they would use a field of light to create moving ones. But in practice, going from this to this was anything but straightforward. Our sponsor Ridge Wallet is the sleek way to keep wallet bulge down thanks to their compact frames and RFID blocking inner plates. Use offer code LINUS to save 10% and get free worldwide shipping. Like any stereoscopic 3D display, a looking glass needs to show an image from at least two perspectives to create the sensation of depth. In the movie theater, this is done using polarized projectors and lenses, while in a VR headset, it's done by physically separating the images that are sent into each eye. But both of these techniques have limitations. A 3D film, for example, can only be viewed from a single vantage point. You can't, you know, move your head around to see a sticker on Buzz Lightyear's shoulder. And a VR headset, well, it's not easily shared with a friend or a colleague. This glass's technology, by contrast, allows a group of people, as many as can fit in about a 50 degree cone coming out of the display, to view and interact with 3D objects and renders in real time. It requires no eyewear and allows each user's perspective to individually change as they move their head around within the viewing cone. So you guys can actually see this aspect of the effect on camera even. It's super trippy. It's like I'm holding this frog right now. Don't worry, I'll be careful with it. And whether we're looking at the 2.5K or the 4K dev kit, the most striking thing about the looking glass is how real the objects inside appear to be. Because here's the thing, on a 2D display, every pixel shines with a given intensity and color. But through a looking glass, the light also has directionality to it. So this sophisticated slab of optics actually splits the otherwise totally normal display underneath into 45 different perspectives. That means that as you move left and right, each eye is grabbing the image from a different point of view, and the light reflections off of the objects in the looking glass actually change realistically. And again, that is on a per eye basis. This comes at a significant cost to image fineness, because only one out of every 45 pixels of the display can be allocated to each perspective. But it works quite a bit better than you'd think, because the 3D effect and the better lighting realism increases the perceived resolution. And so does the way that looking glass actually splits each pixel into the individual RGNB sub-pixels before mapping them to the various perspectives. As you guys can imagine, the processing involved in rendering a scene, even a simple one like this algae demo that was created in Unity, from 45 different perspectives, is not trivial. And the GTX 1050 in this gaming laptop is working pretty hard, and we're still not getting a locked 60 FPS. So these experiences are pretty good, but looking glass, even though they've actually shipped thousands of these dev kits, hasn't considered either of them good enough to slap their company name on it and fully productize it. That comes in a moment. This is the looking glass 8K, and this thing absolutely has to be seen to be believed. Now, as before, it takes 45 pixels to create a single pixel from all 45 perspectives. But guys, when you're working with 33 million pixels instead of just 8 million, it gives you a ton of different benefits. First and foremost, of course, is that you get a much finer image. I mean, the dev kits are impressive, but when I walked into this room, my eyes just about popped right out of their sockets. This 3D model of a person's face is crazy lifelike. And once we swapped it out for a 3D scan of a real person, removing some of the uncanny valley effect, it got even more convincing. Another benefit is that they actually needed far fewer optical tricks in order to create the 3D effect. So this slab on the front of the display is much thinner than the dev kits. See, a big chunk of this was actually used to pull the image up away from the actual display to deepen the focal point, which is the part of the image that appears to be in focus to your eyes. On the 8K, that's no longer necessary, and again, thanks to the additional resolution, it's possible to have objects sink into the display and even appear to be popping out of it with much, much greater clarity. You can't really capture it on camera, but in person, the effect is shocking and impressive. And what's really cool about it is it's surprisingly comfortable to look at. In spite of the fact that I showed up here jet-lagged and with a bit of a headache, I didn't experience any of the discomfort that I feel with something like a Nintendo 3DS, or the nausea that you experience when watching VR content that's not at a very high refresh rate. And during this demo, we also got a really good look at the appearance of apps before they get moved over to the looking glass. So I was able to get up close and see some of the RGB subpixels that are clearly in the wrong place, like a very bright green pixel that's sitting in a dark mountain range that must need to be remapped somewhere else. So this whole process of remapping subpixels needs to be done extremely accurately, and every finished display actually needs to be calibrated to account for tiny discrepancies in the manufacturing tolerance of the optics. So that information then gets stored in the display kind of like a digital fingerprint. The rest of the processing though is done by the PC. So believe it or not, most of the engineering work that gets done here is actually software engineering. They've got SDKs for Unity and Unreal Engine. They've created useful little tools like a 3D mouse cursor that allows you to use a simple regular mouse to select or focus on 3D objects with a 2D input device. And they've got a 3D model importer so that anyone can grab a model out of a repository and view it. And of course, many of the demos that they ran focused on what they expect people to actually do with these things in the real world. Medical applications, both for students and practicing doctors, are basically limitless. And I was blown away by how different it was experiencing this tour of the house through a looking glass compared to just looking at it in 2D. I really felt like I had a great sense of the scale of the space to walk around in. And that's without putting on a headset or even glasses. I mean, architectural firms, design firms, they're going to be all over that because you can sit with the client and look at it and interact with it without, you know, any weirdness. As before, it's 45 rendering passes for every one of these demos at 8K. So as you guys can probably imagine, this one ain't running on a laptop. And if the temperature in this room is anything to go by, the RTX 2080 Ti in this system is working pretty hard. So hard, I even had to remove my LTT stealth hoodie. LTTstore.com. Two of the most mind blowing demos for me personally were this render of some cartography tools, where as you move your head around, the magnifying glass here actually works exactly the way you'd expect. And this recording of one of Looking Glass's developers that was taken on an Azure Connect. So you can see there's actual depth to her face. And you guys might not realize this, but odds are if you have a recent model smartphone, you are carrying a depth sensing camera around in your pocket. So with display technology like this and depth sensing cameras, we're talking real time holographic video calling. That's crazy. Now, there are some blind spots in this image because it was taken with a single camera from a single perspective. But that's something that could be overcome pretty easily by just adding a second camera and a little bit of real time software stitching. Isn't that crazy? Like guys, the future is now. Now, the thing is, to own the future, you're going to have to dig pretty deep. Because even the 4K developer kit is three grand and the price for the 8K Looking Glass is contact us. So basically, if you have to ask, you probably can't afford it. So unless you've got a commercial reason for buying one, your best bet is probably to try to find a demo to check out because it is worth seeing in person. And it sounds like the easiest place to do that is going to be CES 2020. This video is brought to you by drop.com. The Koss GMR50 4X ISO gaming headset is audiophile approved and based on a popular Koss headset with custom engineered acoustics for immersive 3D sound. That allows you to get positional cues to hear where your enemies are coming from. There are some changes made from the original, including reduced tension in the lightweight headband for extended comfort and an included cord splitter and there's an inline microphone with a remote, a detachable boom mic and the boom mic actually works with the PS4, Xbox, Nintendo Switch and more without hassle. Get it today and new users who sign up on drop.com can get 20 bucks off this headset. We're going to have that linked below. By the way, guys, make sure you're subscribed to Linus Tech Tips because our team is going to be out there at CES 2020 this year covering all the hottest new tech that we didn't get a chance to go and scope out before the show starts. Like Looking Glass. Also, if you guys enjoyed this video, like, subscribe and all that good stuff. Massive shout out to Looking Glass, especially Sean for spending time with us today and giving us a chance to be one of the first to see this incredible technology.