Earlier this year, Looking Glass successfully raised $252,000 on Kickstarter for its 3D LED cube, dubbed the L3D Cube.
Now the startup actually is shipping cubes — or, rather, kits for assembling your cube — and co-founders Alex Hornstein and Shawn Frayne are getting settled into a new office in Brooklyn. (Frayne is splitting his time between Brooklyn and Hong Kong.) So we stopped by to take a look at the cube and get a better sense of the team’s vision.
In the video above, you can see the cube in action, displaying different visualizations (including one downloaded from Cubetube, the company’s “YouTube for cubes”) and responding to Hornstein’s voice. The pair sees the L3D Cube as a step in the evolution of “volumetric displays” — or, as Hornstein put it, “a simple hologram.”
Granted, the cube can’t show particularly detailed images or animations, but Frayne said that’s the next step.
“We’re doing these stages to understand how people interact with this very very different type of display,” he said. “It’s not a screen, it’s like a living digital object that takes up real space.”