To be fair, while it is lenticular, it's a huge upgrade over the 3DS, which only rendered two views (one for each eye) so it only worked from straight on; the Looking Glass display handles a significantly higher number of views (~45?[1]) so you get continual stereo separation and different viewpoints as you rotate the device. Rendering costs are much higher though!
The 3D effects on the 3DS were surprisingly good, imo. On all but the "New" models, the sweet spot for positioning yourself was pretty narrow, but if you were in the sweet spot things looked great.
The 3DS had a parallax barrier. Personally I got the 3DS around the time that my presbyopia got bad but I thought the images looked really great with my reading glasses.
I was disappointed that they didn't use stereo for Pokémon Sun and Moon but then they would had to have decided if Lusamine's hair formed a sheet or a cone wheras the animation is strangely ambiguous about the issue as it is.
Most 3D TVs use a high frame rate panel and shutter glasses, somewhat like Lenny Lipton's (Cornell physics grad who wrote the lyrics for Puff the Magic Dragon)
which uses a double-pumped projector and a device which electrically rotates polarized light on alternate frames so that circular polarized lenses on the glasses work like the shutter glasses. (I'm a little sad that I never got to see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_3D)
You don't lose quality in principle from this scheme but you do lose brightness and the real answer is "it's complicated" when you change the frame rate.
Most 3D TV however is in a side-by-side format where half of the horizontal frame is used for one eye and the other half is used for the other eye so you really do lose some horizontal resolution.
My best 3D viewer right now is a Meta Quest 3 on which I've watched Space Station 3D and The Rise of Skywalker though sometimes I think about picking up a used 3D TV. If a monitor or TV supports high frame rates you could get 3D for free if it wasn't for the shutter glasses being rather expensive.
> Most 3D TV however is in a side-by-side format where half of the horizontal frame is used for one eye and the other half is used for the other eye so you really do lose some horizontal resolution.
This is not how 3d TVs work, it's only one of the common ways of storing the files.
More and more of these threads feel like there's posters in here that are LLM hallucinations...
You probably already have a solution for this, but ALVR is amazing for getting Quest hardware (any of them) to do hardware-accelerated wireless streaming: https://github.com/alvr-org/alvr
The 120hz refresh rate of those newer displays really opens up when you have a proper desktop GPU to drive them. The past few weeks I've been dusting off my Quest 1 with ALVR over USB and it's great. You can have the goofiest setup (NixOS? GNOME Wayland? Nvidia drivers? Come right in!) and it will translate the Quest's built-in tracking into SteamVR with less than a frame of delay.
Gotta love it when that thing you thought was dead is actually pretty usable thanks to sideloading and a hardworking community. If I hadn't just gotten 2 weeks of VTOL VR out of that headset I might have remembered to resent the $400 I spent on it.
Why alvr? Air link or virtual desktop are easier and work just as well in my experience. And now there's Steam link too. Admittedly I haven't tried alvr for 3 years so maybe I'm wrong. Is there any benefit over the other options?
Does it work well on Linux now? I’ve been looking for a virtual desktop alternative for a while now, but last time I checked out alvr it still seemed quite unstable.
It looks great, but didn't Amazon burn through $170 million for their Fire Phones with a 3D effect that consumers simply didn't care for? It's such a cool gimmick that has absolutely no practical use (except on the Nintendo 3DS).
Chicken/Egg problem for sure. Niche effect that Amazon had trouble encouraging app makers to build for (lots of effort for no users), and since there were no blockbuster apps, users didn't buy it.
And it was only parallax pseudo-3D. It wasn't anything like the 3DS lenticular stereo effect. Four (!) head-tracking cameras on the front tried to understand where you were looking, and then the UI would shift about in response. There was no convincing 3D effect.
The intention was that the UI would reveal extra info (like meta-data about a photo, or calendar details) when you shifted your head POV. Like a gesture that you could do one-handed while riding the bus. (But not discoverable, and twitchy, and tail-wagging-the-dog.)
Given how coarse the tracking had to be so that the UI wasn't constantly shifting, it would have been far simpler and more energy efficient just to use the accelerometer instead of the fancy camera setup. And just use that for some nice parallax effects in the launcher; not as a core UI interaction.
I'm in the planning phase right now of building my own virtual pinball table cabinet, would absolutely love a 3D display like this to install it in. Course spending close to $10,000 just for the display is a bit much so I'm just going to focus on finding a good 120Hz 4K 43" display and use re-render and infinicolor to provide some depth of field.
By the way, what happened to that company that raised a few billion and was going to absolutely revolutionize AR for everyone, and had the most amazing demos ever, and their release was just around the corner?
Supposedly they have open roles, but it's probably just for show (since displaying 0 openings would be perceived as a negative signal). Archive.org corroborates not much is changing.
I’ve got a Microsoft HoloLens which is more than a brick but not much more. it is weird to open up a music player turn my back to it and really have it sound like it is behind me.
Because I trust a random HN commenter more than what I can find on Google easily these days (though I did still search first of course)... why will they be a brick at the end of the year?
If it's not for some strong built-in reason (impossible-to-update firmware has a hard date after which it will crash, etc.), do you think picking up one to experiment with would still be worth it?
How does anyone enchant investors? They were early to the table and had amazing demos. In 2014 when I did a few year stint in live action VR, there were already murmurings of Magic Leap being vaporware.
But yeah, your impression lines up with what I was hearing 10 years ago too. Magic Leap was leaning waaaaay too hard into a premium market that was too poorly formed to satisfy, with decreasingly valid value prop as the field of VR evolved. Google Glass would bite the bullet, HoloLens found a few government contractors to pick up the bill and surely Vision Pro will peter out with similar slight entrenchment.
Mainstream VR just doesn't make sense, and consumers won't admit it because we're desperate to be wowed. I like my Oculus Quest, but even a perfect version of the headset wouldn't replace my phone or my PC.
I have to admit though that I am wondering how to make content for it. I have a Lytro Illium which is mostly a white elephant and an Quoocam Ego stereo camera. Maybe I need to synthesize images for it.
I have a bunch of stereo 180 degree images I've captured. Too bad there's really no existing work flow for going from those images to something that would be suitable for this.
Of course, any such method would need to come up with data from the thin air, but it seems there are pretty decent algorithms for doing exactly that nowdays.
Dangit, I got excited for System Shock 3 or a new Thief and now I feel let-down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looking_Glass_Studios