Looking Glass ‘Liteforms’ are Holograms You Can Talk With
Looking Glass, a company that develops software and hardware for the creation and display of holograms, has announced Liteforms, a platform that displays holograms of characters that can carry on conversations with a user.
Lifetorms are a combination of two main technologies. The first is Looking Glass’s own headset-free 3D holographic display tech that it has been refining since 2020.
“Looking Glass is well-known for developing the most realistic holographic solutions that breathe life into 3D digital content, all without the need for headsets,” Shawn Frayne, co-founder and CEO of Looking Glass, says.
“But over the past few years, we’ve been prototyping new ways to not only create and view holograms but to communicate with them. With all the major leaps made with large language models like ChatGPT, now you can! We couldn’t be more excited to see how brands around the world use Liteforms to connect their fans to the magic of talking, ‘living’ holograms.”
The second half of the equation is ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot that was released at the end of last year by OpenAI, the same company behind the Dall-E generative AI.
Combined, the two technologies allow users to engage with characters on a holographic display, the application of which Looking Glass says is vast. The company is already speaking with retail brands and is pitching its user in out-of-home advertising and location-based entertainment sectors.
“Liteforms allow brands to build memorable experiences for their audiences by combining highly engaging holographic displays with branded conversational holographic characters trained in their entire product and service offerings,” the company says.
Looking Glass says that brands are looking for better ways to interact with potential customers and are starting to move towards text-based chatbots. But what the Liteforms platform offers goes beyond that and significantly boosts the sense of immersion, which Looking Glass says improves immersion — especially since Liteforms can be talked with and hold a conversation without the need for a keyboard or for typing.
The conversational holograms are designed to work on any of Looking Glass’s systems, from its desktop displays and photo frames all the way up to its giant 65-inch, 8K display.
Liteforms will be available as a subscription service that, as expected, will be broken into tiers. A basic Liteforms subscription will start at $20 per month and will include a set of holograms that have been made by Looking Glass, including Uncle Rabbit, Little Inu, and Andi the Robot. Expanded options for groups or organizations will also be avaialble, but no details were provided at the time of publication. Looking Glass says it intends to share more on these subscription plans later this summer.
Image credits: Looking Glass
