Why is Kickstarter letting a hologram “scam” raise $250k?

[Nintendo]

My only comment was that it didn't seem like a scam since they clearly outline how the product works in the Kickstarter and also the demo looked like a real device. If that was changed later as Exophase has pointed out, and initially they had misleading info, then yeah , I can see that being a problem. I wasn't aware they had done that.


That said, I did notice some comments posted about it seemed to be coming from people affiliated with the project. So the comment about them praising their own project in the comments comes as no surprise actually - which is pretty bad


I also did comes across this , seems you can make a similar thing for about $1- minus their important third step which provides perspective tracking Seems a lot have people have built one to sit on an ipad also


It is interesting that people who have created just the pyramid peppers ghost model also call their setup a hologram, and that's without the active perspective tracking/display - so hmm.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/UFhhIOaGW7U?feature=oembed

Ahahahahahahahaha, I told you so!!

 

[Exophase]

My only comment was that it didn't seem like a scam since they clearly outline how the product works in the Kickstarter and also the demo looked like a real device.  If that was changed later as Exophase has pointed out, and initially they had misleading info, then yeah , I can see that being a problem.  I wasn't aware they had done that.   

That said, I did notice some comments posted about it seemed to be coming from people affiliated with the project.  So the comment about them praising their own project in the comments comes as no surprise actually - which is pretty bad

I also did comes across this , seems you can make a similar thing for about $1- minus their important third step which provides perspective tracking   Seems a lot have people have built one to sit on an ipad also

It is interesting that people who have created just the pyramid peppers ghost model also call their setup a hologram, and that's without the active perspective tracking/display - so hmm.

You can find a ton of people demonstrating a Pepper's Ghost pyramid reflecting a display like this starting at least a few years ago. I don't think it's a coincidence that H+ chose this design, they were almost certainly inspired by seeing someone else do it. To their credit, they've put some work into making this nice, so it'd be hard to match it exactly with cheap materials and a tablet. And they offer some added features to try to bridge the semantic gap to a "real" 3D image, but IMO there are still some big issues with the project:

1) The KS makes it clear that it uses motion tracking to follow the user's view. What it doesn't make clear is that it requires sensor data from a phone (instead of something like using an embedded camera with head tracking algorithms) which I find very misleading. And not just because it fundamentally misrepresents what usage requirements the device has. For one thing, it'll only work if the phone follows your head, such as if it's strapped to your forehead; in the demo video the phone is tilted like the person's view would be and that's not how anyone will use this. Also, there's going to some pretty bad lag here, at least by the standards of creating a convincing viewpoint illusion. The sensor data has to be reported from the phone to the device over a wifi network (they say that Bluetooth is supported too but that the performance is even worse, which isn't hard to believe since BT often has latencies in the dozens of ms). Then the motion data has to be reported to the device feeding the image to the Holus, and either it or the Holus (this part isn't clear, their language suggests both) projects the image onto the screen in a way that maps to the pyramid. You can feel substantial lag in the fish demo and this will seriously break things for people. Just look at how aggressively VR headset makers are trying to reduce lag, where even in a much more integrated platform it isn't enough.

2) The motion tracking and face stitching are neat, but they totally go against what's being promoted which is a shared social display that multiple people can look at. And they have videos and images up that are still misleading, because they show stitching and tracking from the camera's perspective while a bunch of people look at it from totally different angles - people who would be getting a totally broken looking display.

3) Sure, others call things like this holograms, but they're not selling a product. And they've made it abundantly clear what their technology is.

4) Each program using this needs to interface with an SDK to get anything resembling a 3D effect. Unless they can find a way to hack this into any software using Unity or Unreal they're going to have something that little bothers to support because there's such poor turnaround for it. It'll be a lot different from something like Occulus support.

5) They talk a lot about future technologies and where they hope to be in years down the road. Which is great, but KS pledges are for a specific product, not in the potential for new technology down the road. Pledges are not venture capital and it really feels like they're treating it this way.

I think this is another example of engineers who are super excited with pie in the sky concepts, not people who want to scam others so they can make a quick buck. They've clearly already spent a lot of money on development, and are asking for a relative pittance. I have a good feeling that they, like many others today, are using the KS as an advertising platform to increase their investor's enthusiasm about the project. They've probably hired an ad agency to do their promotional material which is full of vague and fluffy nonsense.

 

[Klumpen]

http://www.southpark.de/alle-episod...c3-94b7-119c8d412f99&position=1&sort=!airdate
"PGS Lab" would be a catchy name too.

Money for nothing, yay!
http://observer.com/2015/09/three-y...-still-holding-onto-1m-without-care-from-ftc/