Recording holograms with The Looking Glass
- What is The Looking Glass?
- Record and upload holograms to Vimeo with Unity
- Submit your holograms to Vimeo
The Looking GLass a universal holographic display for 3D creators that allows you to interact with truly 3D worlds, without the need for VR/AR headgear.
This document describes the process of how you can create content for The Looking Glass and submit it to our curated Vimeo channel. Content from this channel will appear in The Looking Glass Vimeo application.
The Looking Glass is a patent-pending combination of lightfield and volumetric display technologies within a single three-dimensional display system. 45 unique simultaneous views of a virtual scene are captured on a computer at 60 frames per second. These dozens of views are encoded into a video signal that is sent via HDMI to the Looking Glass. The Looking Glass optics decode the video signal into a full-color, superstereoscopic three-dimensional scene.
In order to record holograms 🕺 you will need the following:
-
Unity (version
2017.3or higher) -
Vimeo Unity SDK (version
0.9.3or higher) - Looking Glass HoloPlay SDK
- A registered Vimeo account
If you own a Looking Glass display you are welcome to take a moment and run through this extra step to set it up, if not, don't worry we are still going to create and publish the hologram.
For the purposes of this jam, we are going to create a bare-bones scene that records a simple shape from the 3D world into the special video format (called a quilt) which is uploaded to your Vimeo account, and everything happens from inside Unity... cool.
Start by creating a new Unity scene and importing the two SDK's mentioned earlier. Add a HoloPlay Capture prefab into your scene by right-clicking the hierarchy view and select HoloPlay Capture.
You should now see a fancy green box, which is a physical representation of The Looking Glass. The blue arrow is pointing at the front of the display. Anything you put inside of this box will show up in the Looking Glass and your future holographic recording.
Add a cube from the GameObject/3D Object/Cube menu. Move and scale it so it fits into the green box. You are now ready to capture and publish your first holographic video.
Right-click your hierarchy view and select Video/Vimeo Recorder, this will create a new GameObject called the [VimeoRecorder].
Once it's added to your scene, select the object and you will need to sign into your Vimeo account. Once logged in, you are ready to record.
Since you have both the Vimeo and HoloPlay SDK installed, you will see a checkbox called Capture Hologram. Check it! ✅ You are now able to record a hologram of your 3D scene. Click the Start Recording button. After it is finished recording the video will automatically be uploaded to your Vimeo account.
The out-of-the-box Vimeo SDK uses Unity's native MediaEncoder to record, but we have found that it produces low-quality results at times. We recommend upgrading to AVPro's Movie Capture if you're looking for a super high-quality capture.
If you are using AVPro Movie Capture, you will need to add a Capture from Texture component to the VimeoRecorder and connect it to the VimeoRecorder interface.
You created a hologram, recorded it and uploaded it to Vimeo. Neat!
Want to be featured in the upcoming Vimeo Looking Glass app? All you need to do is submit your holographic Vimeo video. We will review the content to make sure it meets our content guidelines and if so, add it to the Looking Glass Picks channel. If added, your content will appear in the official Vimeo app on The Looking Glass.