Your iPhone takes beautiful bokeh images, and these look truly astonishing on Looking Glass Go, a display that turns your pictures into 3D holograms. Children, pets, whatever you send to the screen seems to be floating in the frame. No headset or special glasses are necessary.
As cool as the 6-inch photo frame is — and it’s very cool — my time with the product turned up limitations you should consider before purchase.
Looking Glass Go review
Apple calls pictures with the subject in focus but the background blurry Portrait images. Everyone else calls them bokeh images. It’s easy to snap these — iPhone 15 models and iPhone 16 models even let you add bokeh to many pictures already taken of a person, dog or cat. And these look gorgeous on your iPhone, Mac or iPad.
But until you’ve seen the 3D holograms displayed on the Looking Glass Go, you ain’t seen nothing. Especially as looking at them doesn’t require an expensive VR headset. All you need is the photo frame and your eyes.
Table of contents: Looking Glass Go review
- Display shows 3D hologram anyone can see
- Limitations and suggestions to get around them
- A design not quite like other digital frames
- Advanced functions for creators, too
- Looking Glass video
- Looking Glass Go final thoughts
- Pricing
Display shows 3D hologram anyone can see
Use your iPhone to snap a picture of your child or pet and you can transfer it to the Looking Glass Go with the developer’s free iOS application. You use the software to specify what you want to be in the foreground and background — the app makes a guess but you can finetune that. You can also vary the virtual distance between foreground and background. Then you wirelessly transfer the image to the digital frame.
What appears is foreground image apparently floating in front of the background image. Move your head and the background moves, leaving the foreground image in place, creating a 3D effect. The more virtual distance between the two, the more the background moves.
Photo: Looking Glass
It can store a collection of images and cycle through them. There’s room for images of the whole family.
Looking Glass Go definitely catches people’s attention. I set it out at a recent party to see if anyone would notice, and before too long people were gathered around talking about how great it looks.
Beyond the 3D effect, images are clear and bright. The 6-inch screen has a 1440 by 2560 resolution — 490 pixels per inch. It’s 8-bit color (16.7M colors).
And soon, images won‘t be the only option. Looking Glass developed software to allow iPhones and iPads to turn cinematic videos filmed on the handset into moving holograms and show them on the Go. (If you’re not familiar with the term, it’s essentially bokeh for video.) The necessary software is still in beta testing, though.
Limitations and suggestions to get around them
I hope you’re impressed because it’s time to talk about the limitations. Most notably, the display is portrait orientation only — lay the photo frame on its side into a landscape orientation and the 3D effect stops working.
And because it’s only 6 inches measured diagonally, there’s really only room for one person, or maybe two or three if they are standing very close together. No wide group shots — you end up with big black bars above and below the image and tiny little people.
To be clear, you can upload any image you want, but you need to choose carefully to get pictures that look beautiful on the Looking Glass Go. Based on my testing, I recommend images of a person (maybe a couple) who is close to the camera and with a blurry background achieved with the iPhone’s bokeh effect.
What doesn’t work is pictures in which the subject is very small against a big background. Like someone standing 100 feet from the camera with the whole Eiffel Tower behind them.
Although you can’t fit many people in each image, the Looking Glass Go can hold a collection. Upload individual holograms of each of your family, friends and pets and you’re really taking advantage of the 3D photo frame.
And finally, the display’s viewing angle is only about 58 degrees. Look at the screen from too oblique an angle and it goes black. In real-world terms, that means you shouldn’t put the frame near the middle of a long room — it needs to be at one end so people don’t try to see the image from the side.
A design not quite like other digital frames
Photo: Ed Hardy/Cult of Mac
Everything this product does needs more than the usual computing power for a digital frame, so there’s more hardware, too. The extra goes into a fold-out section that also acts as a stand.
Which is great: flip open the clamshell, plug in the device and it’s ready. Don’t reach for 3D glasses or a VR headset — these are unnecessary.
Those who want a traditional-looking plastic frame for the LCD need to pay extra. It’s $30, and clips on easily. It comes in any color you want, as long as what you want is white.
Advanced functions for creators, too
The Looking Glass Go can be a very cool-looking digital photo frame for pics of the wife and kiddies, but that’s only the start. It can also be a way for creators of 3D content to show off their work. These can be made with Blender, Unity, Unreal Engine and Maya — there are plugins for these applications available.
If this sounds exciting, consider the Looking Glass Go: Creator Bundle, which adds a battery and carrying case so you can show off your work wherever you need to.
Looking Glass video
Looking Glass Go review: Final thoughts
Bored with ordinary digital picture frames? Or maybe you’re looking for a standout gift for someone who already has everything. Let me recommend Looking Glass Go. It’s ability to turn pictures made with your iPhone into 3D holograms is amazing
Just don’t overlook the limitations.
★★★★☆
Pricing
A unique product like this one doesn’t come cheap. You can get the basic Looking Glass Go for $270.
Buy it from: Looking Glass
Or the Creator Bundle I mentioned costs $349.
Not satisfied with a 6-inch screen? There’s also a 16-inch version. It comes in at $4,000, though.
If you want something less cutting edge — and expensive — I have a GPX Capture 7″ Wifi Photo Frame that I really like.
Looking Glass provided Cult of Mac with a review unit for this article. See our reviews policy, and check out more in-depth reviews of Apple-related items.
Ed Hardy has been writing full-time about tech for 25 years, and using it for much longer than that. His intro to Apple was a Macintosh Classic II (which he still has), but now he uses a 13-inch iPad Pro as his primary computer. He’s written for NotebookReview, TabletPCReview, and Brighthand, as well as other sites.
