Looking Glass might have just invented the GIF’s 3D successor - The Verge

The Looking Glass Block is a new image format that lets you peek inside a 3D scene, viewing holograms on flat screens or even a VR headset thanks to open standards and WebXR technology.

On June 15th, 1987, CompuServe introduced the GIF, a way to share images — or animated sequences of images — anywhere. The incredible portability of the late Steve Wilhite’s “graphics interchange format” made it the perfect canvas for viral memes.

Now, a company called Looking Glass is trying to make holograms effortlessly portable, too.

“Imagine we’re in a parallel universe and every movie ever shot was shot in color, but every human being was watching in black and white,” says Looking Glass co-founder and CEO Shawn Frayne. “That’s the situation we’re in with 3D.”

He says that if you add up all the CG movies, video game screenshots, 3D models, and portrait mode photos — and, yes, NFTs — there are hundreds of trillions of pieces of 3D content that we only ever experience in 2D.

That’s why his holographic display company is introducing the Looking Glass Block: a new image format that lets you peek inside a 3D scene, even if you’re viewing it on a normal flat screen. It’s built on web standards so you can view them in any modern web browser, much like a GIF or JPEG.

https://www.theverge.com/23132875/looking-glass-blocks-3d-vr-sharable-image

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