Looking Glass’s Kickstarter Campaign for Personal Holographic Display Raises $1.7 Million

Looking Glass Factory is less a factory, more a venture-backed holographic display startup in Brooklyn.

On Thursday, it launched the Looking Glass Portrait on Kickstarter with a $50,000 fundraising goal. The device had 6,300+ backers and $1.7+ million pledged as of Monday morning. NB: Crowdfunding campaign ≠ shipped product.

Obi-Wan Kenobi on your desktop

Portrait is what you get when you cross a photo frame with holographic content. It’s capable of standalone 3D photo/video playback, but tethering Portrait to a computer unlocks more options:

• Run apps built in Unity or other 3D engines
• Stream 3D video with Kinect or other depth-sensing cameras, including new lidar-equipped iPhones
• Interact with holographic content using a supported VR controller or hand-sensing device

Zoom out: Crowdfunding an exciting new technology...sounds like the early 2010s? Ironically, Portrait integrates with last-decade’s mixed-reality hardware that failed to gain consumer traction or faded away when the novelty wore off.

Portrait could face this fate when/if it ships. But it has early momentum. And we’re slowly doing away with mixed-reality production bottlenecks as new capture technologies are democratized across consumer devices.