Holograms are coming to the Internet

99.9999999% of all the stuff made in 3D has only ever been displayed in 2D.

That’s completely insane.

So... imagine a parallel universe in which every movie ever made had been shot in color, but was only ever shown in black and white.

It’s like that with 3D content, except we’re losing more than color. We’re losing an entire dimension.

Every Pixar movie ever made was crafted in 3D, but was then rendered out from only one perspective for 2D screens.

Hundreds of thousands of pieces of NFT artwork... sculpted in 3D tools like Cinema 4D or Blender, but displayed and sold in 2D as flat single renders.

Every game ever developed in a 3D engine like Unity, Unreal — Halo, Fortnite, Roblox, and thousands more — was developed in 3D, but is played and viewed in 2D. And every screenshot, every live stream of those 3D games - yup, viewed only in 2D.

Even every portrait mode photo ever shot with a phone is innately 3D — over a billion phones have depth cameras that capture 3D information — but every one of those photos has only ever been viewed in 2D.

So we’re going to stop this craziness. This is where the holograms come in.

This is for all the 3D creators that want to share their work to the maximum possible audience across all 2D and 3D platforms simultaneously, at the highest 3D quality. We're bringing holograms to the internet through the first holographic media embed to work on all devices - desktop, mobile, VR, AR, holographic displays – all delivered through the browser.

Holographic media – that is, media that encodes dozens or hundreds of perspectives into a single image or video – has a unique property. It can represent any 3D content in actual 3D on any platform.

By encoding a multitude of high quality renders of any piece of 3D content into a conventional image or video carrier, all of the 3D wonderfulness of the original 3D content — all of those Pixar movies, game screenshots, pieces of 3D artwork, Portrait mode photos…all of it — can soon be shared and viewed in actual 3D on any device with an internet browser.

This is something we’ve been working on for a while. In fact, thousands of us around the world have been making holographic media for physical holographic displays for the past few years. But today we’re bringing those holograms to every device. Mobile, VR or AR headsets, holographic display - anything.

All through a single link that can be embedded anywhere on the Internet as easily as sharing or embedding a Youtube video. Like…this hologram here, which I dropped into this blog post with a single embed code ↴

This new tool will give 3D creators of all sorts (us included), and eventually everyone around the world, a vastly bigger audience for everything we make and capture in 3D, on the conventional 2D devices we use today and on the 3D devices of tomorrow (we’re looking at you Apple).

Right now this all lives in a prototype we’re testing with a few friends in the rapidly growing community of hologram creators. Their incredible holograms are most likely how you got here. But now we’re at the stage where we’re looking for some more folks to take this hologram baby for a test drive, to help us shape this holographic future on the internet.

So if you’re a 3D creator or just curious, join us as we put holograms on the internet for the first time. Join us as we stop the down-dimensioning of our 3D creations. Join us as we put a dent in the metaverse.

Learn more and sign up for the pilot program here!

To the future!
- Shawn Frayne, CEO & Co-founder of Looking Glass.