A Look back at 3D in 2022 and Look Ahead at 2023D

Want a glimpse at what’s happening at Leia in 2023? Curious about the future of 3D Lightfield technology? All you’d have to do is follow our blog – and socials – over the course of 2022. Yes, we are terrible at keeping secrets. 

We are always talking about developments happening behind closed doors, our manufacturing process, and how we’re utilizing AI to generate 3D here on these pages. So, for a moment, we’re going to look back at some of the major things we revealed and discussed in 2022. Why? Because it all lays the groundwork for a lot of exciting announcements coming from us throughout 2023. 

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New Platforms Previewed

Among the biggest reveals for 2022 came during Display Week when we unveiled our desktop display platform. Fresh out of the labs, it became an attention-grabber for anyone able to experience the Monitor 15 for themselves at trade shows.

The 15.6-inch display offers a bright, crisp 4K resolution for traditional 2D viewing, a shared 3D Lightfield mode, and a deeply immersive 3D mode using head-tracking for a single user.

Back at the Display Week announcement, we said that we, “see this technology touching people on a personal level — what they’ll use during the day to play a game or have a 3D chat with friends.” 

Think about this. We have already perfected the ability to take any 2D streaming video footage online and convert it into 3D on-the-fly. David Fattal, Co-Founder and CTO said at the time, “Imagine how good the 3D would be if people on both sides of the video chat using stereo cameras and Leia hardware. This is part of our plan, going forward, for our own products and we are encouraging our OEM partners to enable that feature as well and incorporate a stereo camera into their devices. Having those front-facing stereo cameras removes the need for computer vision to convert live-streamed video chats. That means much higher quality on both ends and removes artifacting.” 

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‍AI and Generated Art
Another big trend that has surfaced this year: Harnessing AI to create art. In our case, we’ve been using AI to help generate 3D depth maps – to look at images fed into it and helping identify how to do it better, quicker. We see it as a tool to remove the monotonous work and empowers you to tap deeper into your creative side.

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“AI is another step to increase productivity while also reducing the burden on people,” says Andrii Tsarov, SWE Director of Computer Vision and Machine Learning at Leia. “What’s more, AI democratizes some spheres – like computer vision. We’re able to analyze things that were simply not possible before. You can do it with visual information, medical technology also, and in some cases, it democratizes art.”

Taking it a step further, though, is how to combine AI, allowing them to share their learnings. In turn, they become even more powerful tools that will help us all become great creators. Recently, we announced our partnership with Stability AI. Stability AI gives us the ability to create. Whatever you dream in your head and convey in text, you can create. Just imagine what the future holds for us when we’re freed to literally dream things into a digital reality.

3D gets Unreal in 2022 and beyond

In 2021, we released our Unity SDK that allows developers to easily convert their content to work on display lit by 3D Lightfield technology. 2022, though, we made major strides in supporting Unreal (and, more specifically, Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 5) with our SDK. We first announced our partnership earlier this year and we’ve double-downed on what we’re doing by showing what’s possible to developers during Unreal Fest 2022.

David Fattal, talking about gaming specifically, said, “We are currently doing a study on what it could mean, adding those layers of depth to first-person shooters and competitive gaming — everything we can do to give you better situational awareness without losing frame rate. We do think that it can enhance the gameplay and give players a better depth perspective.”

While most people think of “gaming” with Unreal Engine, though, it is used in everything from architecture to modeling cars (and much more).

Mike Weiss, Solution Architect for Epic Games - Enterprise, said to us “What’s becoming interesting other than the HMI use case is exploring these types of displays in design and production environments,” Weiss says. “Whether it's a virtual production stage or asset review, being able to preview stuff, or products and manufacturing design where you’re trying to visualize components.” He also sees the potential to take physical products, then go into Unreal Engine and use a 3D display as a creator presentation tool.

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Spending more time with all you incredible creators…

While all this news has been happening, creators continue sharing their amazing talent across our channels. These are artists from all walks of life that want to breathe new life into 3D art – and we are here for it. Take The Stereoscopic photography community in New York where Carlos Becerra and many others share new approaches to capturing 3D. We also saw the generative AI community embrace our 2D-to-3D LeiaPix Converter to bring their dreams to life. We have a lot planned this coming year so stay tuned for more events, contests, and community master class sessions in 2023. 

That about catches you up with developments over the past 12 months! The next 12, though, are going to be huge! If you’re anything like us, you’re excited about what’s to come in 2023.

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In fact, if you’re attending CES, we strongly recommend you stop by booth 50961 and see the future of 3D Lightfield for yourself.

Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin, as well as our forum for updates and community building! Here's to limitless creativity in 2023D! Happy Holidays!

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