Looking Glass’ new lineup includes a $300 phone-sized holographic display

Looking Glass on Thursday announced that it has begun shipping a pair of new displays, with a third arriving at customer homes later this month. The larger Looking Glass 16- and 32-inch Spatial Displays are available now. The smaller model runs $4,000. The Brooklyn-based startup is making the 32-inch model’s price available on request.

The most interesting of the trio, however, has to be the $299 Looking Glass Go. Pricing has always been the biggest barrier to entry for the company’s holographic displays. While scaling production will continue to bring per-unit costs down, the technology has been largely price prohibitive.

Looking Glass first addressed the issue at the end of 2020 with the $399 Portrait, a holographic digital photo frame. Like the Portrait, the Go debuted as part of a Kickstarter campaign. The device features a six-inch display, making it roughly the size of a smartphone. The device has a foldable base that props it up for display purposes.

The company has also been lowering the barrier of entry on the content side. Users can display spatial images with their own hardware — a feature Apple rolled out on the iPhone 15 Pro and Vision Pro headset. Looking Glass also offers software that can convert older 2D photos to 3D, before transferring them over to the displays via Wi-Fi.

“With the[…] Apple Vision Pro and new spatial 3D capture capabilities in phones, we’ve decided it’s about time for a headset-free holographic device for mainstream users,” Looking Glass writes on the Go’s product site.

Prior to the Go’s release, Looking Glass shipped a self-reported “tens of thousands” of displays. With the price point for the line now starting at a hair under $300, the company will no doubt be growing that number more rapidly, hooking in people who were curious about the tech but didn’t have the thousands of dollars needed for entry.