This Digital Picture Frame Wants to Bring People Closer to a Holographic Future

Holograms are a mainstay of science fiction, popping up across the great expanses of Star Wars, Star Trek, Halo, and The Expanse. If a story is set in the future, or in space, it’s probably got a hologram in it. Unfortunately, this is less the case in real life, despite many tech companies eager to make holograms a reality.

The latest effort to beam a holographic device into our world comes from Looking Glass, a Brooklyn-based company that has been dabbling in 3D holographic screens for nearly a decade. Today, it announced the Musubi, a consumer-focused digital picture frame.

Courtesy of Looking Glass

Upload any picture or video, and Musubi uses artificial intelligence to extract the most important part and hover it in space as a 3D image within the frame. That could be a video of a child’s first steps or a snapshot of a birthday party. (Or, like one of Looking Glass’ examples, a cat exposing its butthole.) The image will be displayed in 3D form, viewable in all its holographic glory across nearly 170 degrees.

“The goal for us is to bring holograms to everybody,” says Looking Glass CEO Shawn Frayne. “In a way, it gets as close to the sci-fi dream as humanly possible.”

The Musubi is a far cry from something like the hologram-adjacent Ava AI that gaming company Razer announced at CES this year and revealed more details about this week at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Razer’s offering is an AI chatbot character that floats in a 3D tube you can put on your desk. The company is pitching it as a “Friend for Life” that can chime in while you’re gaming or help organize tasks in your daily life. (Yes, it is rendered to look like a cute anime girl, but there are other characters.)

The Musubi is a 7-inch photo and video frame. There is no Wi-Fi connection required, no app, no cameras on the device, and no subscription service to keep it working. The actual processing required to turn an image or video into a hologram is done in a program on a PC or MacBook, which Looking Glass includes for free. Once the images are edited, you can add them to the device via a USB-C cable; the Musubi can store up to 1,000 images. (Videos take up more space, but are limited to 30-second-long clips.) The Musubi can be plugged into a wall socket and has a built-in rechargeable battery that lasts up to three hours.