Any camera glass like this will have at least a mild tint and will be used in specialty applications. It'll also have pretty horrible SNR, resolution, and low light performance.

Currently the structural component of this tech is mainly used in extremely high end aerospace applications (various heads up display type systems) so it's unlikely you'll ever run across one of these within the next decade.

Nasty remote sensing tech people can be worried about right now: RF surveillance from various combinations of mmWave, wall penetrating radar, and wifi interferometry. Add in the fact that your IPhone has mac randomization but every other device you own including your car's TPMS doesn't. Also Geiger mode lidar is fun, one company I worked for mapped the inside of a random person's house with it as a demo.

If you're worried that your Airbnb host is going to use it to spy on you (which was mentioned in the article), unless you already scrutinize every nail hole, photo frame, electrical appliance, electrical outlets, smoke detector, etc, this doesn't open up a new vulnerability.

Pinhole cameras with a lens as small as 2mm are already readily available and cheap, no ones going to use an expensive "window camera" to spy on you when they already have so many other options.

Perhaps those that fear government surveillance or other well funded adversaries may have cause for concern, but few of us are in that category.

It's perhaps worth noting, however, that it wouldn't be unusual for a window to have only ~60% transmittance in visible spectrum.

How useful is this statement though? Regular glass isn't 100% transparent either, even in just the visible spectrum. Shouldn't we be more concerned with the delta in the visible spectrum is if we're concerned about easy identification? (before mentioning that plenty of glass is purposefully tinted and dynamic tinting is an application here) And reasonably, couldn't we, theoretically, pick up a decent signal from simply capturing the reflections around the glass edge? I mean we can now do 3D reconstructions from pointing a camera at a mirrored ball. I'm sure it'd be very noisy, but there is signal. I mean to have the capability of projecting you'd have the ability to do the reverse too given that I doubt the internal structure of the glass would be (that) directionally dependent. Right? I can be missing something, it's been awhile since I've done optics.

The truly pathetic thing is that virtually all of these devices could use RPA but don't, because nobody remembered to flip that flag from "n" to "y"

It may not be noticeably visible to the human eye under most lighting conditions, though.

> I assure you it is semi opaque

> It may not be __noticeably visible__ to the human eye under most lighting conditions, though.

I'm not sure you two are disagreeing. Seems like you're just reinforcing their point. I mean if someone said glass is opaque and their evidence is that you can't see through glass and your evidence is to point at UV light... well... you'd be technically correct but you're talking from a different ballpark.

If the image is grayscale and has very high gain/noise/ISO, then I imagine with a low enough frame rate you could avoid noticable tinting. You would likely still notice the tint in comparison to regular glass, I'm too lazy to do the napkin math though.

Practically speaking, I would expect it to be strictly more noticeable than glass for holographic projection. If true, it's likely noticeable.

But the eye is fickle. You don't notice the tint of, say, a car window when you've been inside for a bit. Or sunglasses.

Here's an arbitrary Google search result for in-glass HUDs: https://www.lumineq.com/applications/automotive

They state their glass is 70% transparent. That's definitely noticeably opaque.

I don't think how you framed this is accurate. The quality is a function of the pixel size and of course the exposure time. I mean those are the two main variables that control how much light hits the sensor, but we'd have to get into sensitivity to make direct comparisons (human eyes are VERY sensitive and some evidence that the average eye is sensitive to a single photon, but you're not going to see well with that and this is besides the point).

Definitely not a straight forward calculation and I'm feeling too lazy to go grab my optics books. But guesstimating here, there should be enough light considering you can see light and distortions when looking at the side of a pane. So I'd lean on it being more about the quality of the signal. Which glass is highly structured but I'm assuming that this type of glass has some unique optical properties to specifically make the side panels have higher quality signals. My understanding is that they are projecting from the side, so that's what I'm inferring from -- basically just reverse the photon direction through the medium and I don't have reason to believe that quality is directionally dependent (should I?). My whole spitballing is dependent on this understanding.

> it's likely noticeable.

Well one user said they didn't notice it.

> They state their glass is 70% transparent. That's definitely noticeably opaque.

That's not uncommon for Low-E glass, so maybe not very noticeable, especially in many different environments. But yeah, I think if you compared side by side you'd notice. I think we're just using different criteria and we probably decently align?

Idk, I am mostly thinking aloud here, so I do want to portray that I don't have high confidence here. It's been 10 years since I've been in an optics lab lol. But I've built microphones with really weak signals before and they are useful. Distorted, but useful. (Definitely not fun being forced to run experiments at 3am and find out someone is walking around on the other side of the building...) So I can't see why this couldn't (theoretically) be similarly done for a window? I definitely don't think this would work with a typical pane of glass, especially considering how they're cut, but this does seem like specialty glass specifically built for directing photons directed from an edge to the pane face. Any idea if it can only display to one face? (I'm sure you can invert img but projection face probably matters for a camera?)

It's still creepy though.

5 figures doesn't sound like much for an organized crime network

Total surveillance is just a matter of time...

Just a crazy idea, but I think that if they could make that happen today then they would. And that part is the main point - There is no limit to surveillance anymore. I live in the UK, that realisation is in my face every day. Can’t even take a trip to Tesco without being run through facial recognition.

There is no care for the concept of privacy anymore. All the richest companies in the world don’t make their money from caring about our privacy.

That leaves targeted surveillance, emergency surveillance, and war-time surveillance. Those will probably not be limited, though they are inherently more limited.

I mean, this will be worse if the tech advances no?

The Zeiss site is a much better read:

https://www.zeiss.com/corporate/en/about-zeiss/present/newsr...

In summary:

1) ZEISS unveils holographic Smart Glass at CES 2024, both for displays/projection/filtering, but also another component which is a holographic camera

2) The holocam works by utilizing coupling, decoupling, and light guiding elements to redirect incident light to a concealed sensor, eliminating the need for visible cutouts or installation spaces in visible areas.

3) ZEISS doesn’t plan to be manufacturer, so other companies can use the tech

So you can't just stick on any existing window or pane of glass? That's good.

> The Holocam technology "uses holographic in-coupling, light guiding and de-coupling elements to redirect the incoming light of a transparent medium to a hidden image sensor."

That suggests, at least to me, that you'll need something more than just a simple sheet of glass. There's probably some engineering required to allow light to be guided and redirected towards what sounds like a typical camera sensor.

Sounds like they embedded a light splitter with some sort of periscope style lense inside a glass pane.

So not actually bolted oblique to the glass as GP suggested.

> coupling, decoupling and light guiding elements to divert incident light to a concealed sensor

So, there's a camera in the dash looking up at the windshield and focusing where it expects to see a face, thereby using the windshield as a reflector? And maybe there's some additional etching and deposited films in the windshield to support the angles required?

And perhaps you can put cameras elsewhere, and similarly subtly modify the windshield or other glass to look at other things as well?

---

> Glass surfaces can also generate energy. The microoptical layer in the window pane absorbs incident sunlight and transmits it in concentrated form to a solar cell. This combines the advantages of conventional windows – natural light and an unrestricted view – with the additional benefit of efficient energy production.

what? holy shit?

you mean because it can also power a wireless transmitter or a large memory array storage? cuz a hologram that's not "plugged into something" might turn out to not be that useful.

Huh. Seems like it should be fairly easy to find info on then... though some googling around makes me think they might just be referring to their more general diffraction gratings and whatnot.

Product page: https://www.zeiss.com/oem-solutions/products-solutions/multi...

NASA/ESA mention: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/zeiss_automotive-augmentedrea...

Could you put a polarizer on this and have that filler out the other side of the display, so a smart window is one way visible? That could make smart glasses and headsets much better.

Second, #3 is always a red flag for me. It is sometimes code for "we can do this in the lab but we have no idea how one would manufacture it." A similar analogy is "we've got this great idea for a program you can license but no one here knows how to actually code it up."

Third, the impact of this going mainstream would be hard to underestimate. All those people working on transparent displays like they do in sci-fi movies? Yup they could do that. A video conference system with solid eye contact (mentioned in a couple of places) sure you could do that too. A mirror that could show you wearing different clothes? Yup I could see how that would be coded.

That #3 though. That is what tempers my enthusiasm. Did I miss any announcement that they had a display at CES? (or was it just an announcement) If the former I would seriously consider flying over to Vegas to check this out.

Does Zeiss manufacture any public facing camera currently ? All their general public facing projects are collaborations with Sony or Vivo or other makers, and I think they only manufacture lenses, so nothing with a high quality chip in it.

It's probably another story on the medical side, but this doesn't fit a highly specialized, peofessional only niche with a PC doing the processor on the side.

The principal issue will be gathering enough energy. A well lit source like a bathroom mirror (mirror behind the light guide) could work pretty well I'd wager. If the light guide is too efficient then it will appear opaque, so there is a trade-off.

I find "turns any window" pretty misleading. Unless I'm missing something this needs very special glass or at the very least a special coating/laminate.

For folks worried about privacy, it will almost always be more convenient and cost-effective to install a tiny spy camera somewhere.

Zeiss isn't going to aspire to sell cheap glass on razor thin margins.

Especially true since Zeiss isn't planning on selling these at all. They're selling licenses to the tech.

I doubt that undermines your privacy argument in any meaningful way however. Even if the license was free, the cost of producing the components is certainly magnitudes higher compared to the cost of current tech that accomplishes similar goals.

https://www.microsoft.com/applied-sciences/uploads/publicati...

https://www.microsoft.com/applied-sciences/projects/the-wedg...

Beamforming in RF frequencies is old, beamforming at optical wavelengths is pretty new shit. Doing the reverse, that is receiving a signal, is brand spanking new fresh out the cow hot shit at any frequency.

Projector light engines include potentially many light-beam forming condensing and projection lenses precisely to concentrate light into a uniform quadrilateral. That's not new. The industry continues to advance, though.

Even holographic projection isn't new. This is just that, except the light is (sort of) taking the reverse path.

Technically there is no reason why it can't also project light outwards simultaneously. However light guides aren't really reversible like that: the light usually exits through a small fraction of the guide's external surface area. Reversing that means the entire external surface area is potentially collecting light, which would result in some undesirable caustics in all scenarios I can imagine. Light engines are in part designed to account for this (by reflecting or sinking light into an absorber) but this is still pretty different from what Zeiss is promoting.

For a small permanent installation where you are in control of the lighting I could see this working relatively well, but I have a hard time imagining you could get close anything resembling photo quality without a lot of environmental treatment. Conversely holographic projection is pretty doable on a mobile platform like a headset.

This is pretty new only in that it's probably at least an order of magnitude more difficult to accomplish and thus hasn't been viable up until now. Fundamentally none of the concepts are new, as far as I can tell.

As an example look at your nearest window and imagine it divided into a grid of uniform pixels. Each pixel is a small mirror that reflects a point of focus (wherever you are) to a another, smaller point on an imaging sensor somewhere in the frame. This would look pretty jarring (and jagged) to most people, until you layer a complimentary piece of glass on top of it to make the exterior flush. The two pieces of glass would be high enough precision that once you put them together they are effectively one piece of glass. Ta da.

This is effectively the same process as making any other multi-lensed glass, and that's Zeiss's wheelhouse.

As a side hustle, why don’t you start building and selling desktop PC’s to local businesses, competing with HP, Dell, etc on margin? That’s also tech, right?

While building cheap PCs at razor thin margins is adjacent to whatever your tech job is, and probably something you’re able to do, it probably wouldn’t be the most profitable use of your time

They could license their name to some existing glass company, but they still wouldn't really be the ones producing it, and I think Zeiss has avoided diluting their brand name like this so far.

Thanks for the book rec, I'll probably start digging into it this weekend.

I lit (pun) came to gripe about light pipes...

However here is you solution:

3D print lenses in a header for threads to be arbitrarily placed in a [COMPOUND] lens and pull that feed with AI spatial mapping (yes these are easy now)... EYE

And you can make these in many increments - micro even... "Hey NSa, super simple optical prince Rupert drops on a composite eye" (self destrucing fiber lens when discovered)

There’s a facility across from the Autobahn that was so sensitive trucks going by would throw off their machines. They had to put padding on the autobahn to prevent it. This was after they put the foundation on some kind of suspension. My coworker said they hire the most PHDs in Europe.

While there are some really interesting potential applications for this tech, it is also more than a little disconcerting.

The ubiquity of camera phones and the emergence of tech like those Meta glasses is already pushing us to disconcerting (albeit interesting and in some cases very useful) places, but some of these cutting edge concepts worry me. WiFi seeing through walls also comes to mind…

People didn't like that Google Glass could always be filming, now we don't even have a physical camera.

Rayban/Meta (I believe) have a sensor to detect that the wearer has not attempted to cover the light which shows that the camera is in use, but how will that work when every piece of glass is a camera.

The total lack of any deeper information beyond the bold yet vague claims in the press release is frustrating. The PR makes it sound like a miraculous breakthrough destined to change everything. The source release on the Zeiss site only adds two bits of info.

> "The transparency of the holographic layer has only a minimal effect on the brilliance of the image reproduction. It is also possible to detect spectral components as additional information to complement the visible image. The resulting data provide insights into environmental contamination such as air pollution and UV exposure."

However, experience shows that in reality bold+vague claims like this inevitably come with significant trade-offs and constraints which limit its applications (little things like cost, power, fidelity, size, speed, etc). This is especially true in early implementations of new tech. That said, it may still be both interesting and useful. Unfortunately, we have no way to even think about how it might be useful because Zeiss marketing has chosen to play 'hide the ball' instead of just releasing a technical explainer outlining relevant trade-offs, limitations, etc.

If I was talking to someone from Zeiss my first questions would be about how much the additional components impact the optical characteristics of the glass, what the resolution of the resulting image data is, how large are the components needed at the edges and how far away can they be from the capture zone? Then, of course, how the output of the resulting imaging system maps into traditional camera/lens metrics like f-stops, aperture, imager size/density, gain, focal length, etc. Zeiss is an optics company after all.

The paper mentioned in the Description section can be read here: https://www.academia.edu/52566311/_title_Volume_phase_hologr...

My guess is that each of the items in patent diagram labeled 20 and 22 are gratings of this sort, perhaps with the fringes angled at 45 degrees.

Some additional info may be gleaned from the one patent citing this one, invented by one of the co-inventors of the latter: https://patents.google.com/patent/DE102019206354A1/en

This is pretty cool.

https://www.microsoft.com/applied-sciences/uploads/publicati... https://www.microsoft.com/applied-sciences/projects/the-wedg...

1: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2024468118

Retailers, marketers, and data brokers are salivating.

It'll sure be distracting when it's the windshields of our cars, but I do look forward to the legal drama when companies get sued for painting their "holographic" ads on top of the adspace other people already paid to pollute with their own advertisements.

Anyone that's experienced a cracked windshield understands that this won't be going anywhere outside of some very niche and expensive cars.

Don't do the whole windshield. My car uses a bit of plastic on the dash to reflect a display. I love it!

https://i.imgur.com/jXfWf5b.png

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NORPeCcIXRQ

I see some references to "light guides" and words like "coupling" but I don't know what those mean at all, and all of my googling is not helping to explain how light guides embedded in a thin, mostly transparent layer could possibly be used to project a hi-res holographic 3D light field out of a piece of glass. How big is each guide? What is it exactly -- what is it actually made of? How is it shaped? How are they arranged? How are they illuminated? How do you manufacture something like this?

Can anyone ELI15 how this works?

For just a 1MP display, we're talking like hundreds of millions of fibers? That fit in some thin transparent layer? How?

Minor aside, but does anyone actually care about this? Forever ago, I was told to try and look into the camera in order to project eye contact during video calls, but now that just seems like a cultural hangup that arose from people not being familiar with video calling. Now that it is more ubiquitous, I feel like we all have collectively agreed that the eye contact thing is unnecessary?

Staring into your camera on a multiparty call means everyone feels like they are getting your eye contact, which devalues it. Eye contact moving between participants is the gel that holds conversations together and it's why video calls are still stuck in the conference call era in terms of talking over one another.

You've just acclimated to losing that signal during video chats. Bring it back, and you'll have a richer experience.

More generally, we have evolved special neural hardware to recognize gaze, with a special case for when gaze is directed at our eyes. Gaze is important because it's a sign of where people are attending. And as Herb Simon said: "in the information age, attention is the scarce resource."

Eye contact is about as old as humankind. So maybe in 300,000 years we can check if we get over it with video calls.

It is not that communication is not possible without it. It just removes an additional layer.

Eye contact conveys all kind of useful meta data. Depending on the circumstances and other verbal and non-verbal cues it can mean "I'm listening to you", "oh, maybe let's push more on this topic", "have you also caught that?", "perhaps it would be wiser to not talk about that", "i'm specifically addressing you" or "can you help me out here?". And these are just the ones immediately applicable in business settings. Let's not even talk about all the ways it can be used during flirting.

And it works on a subconscious level. I regularly DM role playing games, both online and in-person. The lack of eye contact is a serious impediment in online games. One can use eye contact, or the lack of it to judge engagement. One can signal with eye contact turns or who an NPC is talking to. It can also be used to help less talkative players seize amazing role playing moments.

Can we get by without it? Sure. We can communicate anything using a 1-bit communication channel using morse code. It is a bit like dancing in shackles. Can be done, just leaves something extra on the table.

A)Initially, a little bit odd, because 98% of people don’t do it/ I’m not use to seeing that

B) Then feels pleasantly good/ natural.

I’m not going to make a decision on a performative behavior like looking at the webcam - at least, not consciously - but I’m sure if/ when this becomes the norm, webcams NOT focused on eyes will seem very “off”

Edit: Should have said "mechanical lens cover" instead of "mechanical camera shutter"

Alternatively, I'd suggest a different arrangement of words like "lens cover", "webcam cover", "webcam cover slider", or "webcam privacy shield" to be more accurate.

Of course we were able to grock what "mechanical camera shutter" meant in this context, although at first I was confused and wondered if in fact there were webcams with mechanical focal plane or leaf shutters.

  Lenses.
  This year's theme is now holograms
  and it's pretty funny that this is
  is called a holocam, and it's pretty funny.
  If you look at it right now, if you look at the spring right here.
  you can see a little bit of blue
  you can see a little bit of blue, which is actually
  what is it?
  it's actually acting as a camera, so
  Now, if you listen to the explanation
  what we call holography.
  is that it's now reflecting light, so we can gather that light
  and you can collect that light and act like a camera
  like a camera, so for example, you can now
  what?
  the meat.
  it can recognize the blue color
  and only recognize the blue part.
  Jace's
  holocam. It's quite
  interesting.

But even relatively poor image quality might be cool, if you had a camera built into your monitor, so you could do direct-eye-contact video calls.

I'm sure it can be used for creepiness as well but I see the benefits too.

https://ios.gadgethacks.com/how-to/disable-facetimes-creepy-...

how did we even get here?

It's a Facetime exclusive, though - no API so other videoconferencing apps can't use that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_of_Other_Days

Requires Zeiss Multifunctional Smart Glass(tm)

There has to be an imaging sensor somewhere. Where is it?

I strongly suspect most of this "magic" will condense out of this cloud into a puddle of marketing sponsored bovine excrement.

It looks like it still requires a sensor, it can just be hidden in the frame of the glass.

In most cases such as the windscreen you can just have a camera on the frame. Why does it need to utilise the glass itself?

I think you’ll find that for a lot of people, it looks cool/elegant/stylish is a deciding factor.

The demo looks greyscale, and super low res and low FPS.

I think then intention is it just needs to be enough to know where the users face is and project a HUD at them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NORPeCcIXRQ

> From time to time we also publish advertorials (paid-for editorial content) and sponsored content on the site.

https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/news/about-us

Next someone will tell me they have a way to “ssh” into the universe and get process details on every entity in it including every human and what’s happening.

Kind of like in the matrix with The architect.