Leia’s Holographic 3D Lume Pad Launches
Leia, Inc., the creators of 3D Lightfield products and software, today announced the availability of its 3D Lume Pad. This high-performance Android 10.8-inch tablet projects images in true 3D off — and deeper into — the screen, visible with the naked eye. The Lume Pad supports all the apps and features of a premium tablet and, with the touch of a button, converts photos and videos to 3D in real time for streaming, creating, and sharing. It also makes 2D and 3D apps and games a more immersive experience. The Lume Pad is available today on Amazon.com, and on Leiainc.com for a suggested retail of $649.00.
Dubbed “the world’s first 3D Lightfield tablet”, the Lume Pad won innovation awards at CES earlier this year. While the company is working with manufacturers all over the world to build devices like the Lume Pad from its reference designs, today it is also introducing its own branded tablet. They’ve also been working to build an app ecosystem to support the new technology’s capabilities.
“Many years of development in Nanotechnology and AI are coming together to power Lume Pad” says Fattal. “For the first time, we are delivering a virtually infinite amount of 3D content to consumers in a familiar mobile form factor and with zero compromise on the 2D experience.”
3D Lightfield on the Lume Pad is realistic, multi-dimensional, and natural. Behind the scenes, integrated AI technology is adding texture, depth, and light. A wide array of 2D and 3D content and apps came installed on our demo unit. Fattal emphasized when we talked that the company’s core mission is to deliver experiences. The hardware has to be there, but its the apps — and their recurring revenue — that have the biggest potential business impact.
We’ve been using a demo unit for the past few days and can vouch for the power of the unique display and how it enhances still and moving images to make them expand above and below the planes of glass in the device. It can go back and forth between lightfield 3D mode and normal 2D, retaining all the practical features of a new Android tablet. With its floating holographic display anchored by the Lume tablet’s screen, the Lume Pad does some truly amazing things. We streamed 2D YouTube videos and watched Lume instantly turn them into 3D experiences. Lume Pad can also capture, edit, and share 3D pictures and video which can be shared on LeiaPix, the 3D imaging social network with Sketchfab integration. There’s an app store with a growing number of 3D games. When you’re not using the Lume Pad, it makes an amazing frame to show off your Lightfield captures.
Since spinning off from HP in 2010, co-founder and CEO David Fattall and his team have raised over $160 million dollars. They will need every penny to bring a new hardware product to the consumer market. This is a hard concept to explain and even harder to show on the current 2D media its technology may someday supplant. CMO David Sitbon told us the company plans to work social channels and target streaming services like Hulu with TV ads.
The ad itself, directed by Emmy award winner Ulf Johansson and produced by Smith and Jones films, is every bit as surprising — and surprisingly expensive — as a Super Bowl ad. The ultra slick production is a masterpiece of commercial storytelling. It treads a fine line between reality and fantasy, and only reveals Leia’s Lume Pad in its final seconds. The company is making a big bet that this bold and expensive statement will get people’s attention, but their future does not ride on its success as it develops other lines of business like a 3D app store.
Leia’s marketing challenge is not unique. Both Microsoft and Magic Leap have had difficulty portraying what it looks like from inside the device. This is real visual effect of a hologram in space can’t be portrayed in 2D media without substantial special effects. You’d need a special screen that Leia makes.
In conjunction with today’s launch, Leia is also announcing two important content partnerships. The first is with Mozaik Education, a leading provider of textbooks and digital learning solutions. Bundled with the Lume Pad, the Mozaik 3D Learning app offers more than 1,200 3D learning scenes and hundreds of educational videos, courses, quizzes and games. Lume Pad users will get a complimentary 1-year subscription to this powerful teaching tool.
Additionally, Leia has joined forces with Gameloft, a global leader in gaming solutions, to harness all the full-throttle action of Asphalt Nitro 2 and make it jump off Lume Pad’s revolutionary 3D screen. Using Leia’s SDK, the popular racing game fully leverages the Lightfield technology to add more depth for a more realistic and immersive experience.
Leia is offering all of the 3D Lightfield games and apps in the Leia app store for free through the end of 2021.
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Originally published at https://www.forbes.com.
