Holographic displays have lived in the realm of corporate showrooms and research labs for years. Looking Glass Factory, which has quietly shipped thousands of units to professionals and enthusiasts since 2018, is finally trying something different: making holograms ordinary.
The company has announced Musubi, a 7-inch frame scheduled to start shipping in June, priced at $149. For the first 24 hours of the Kickstarter campaign, the frame costs $99. By any measure, this represents a significant price drop from Looking Glass' previous consumer-focused effort.
The actual device is deliberately simple. Musubi is a 7-inch frame with a glass border and white matte that acts as the home for whatever content you convert and upload to it. The frame can store up to 1,000 images or 30-second video clips and can display content for three hours on a single charge, or indefinitely if plugged in with an included wall adapter.
The real work happens on your computer. Users connect the frame to a computer, load a file, and use a free desktop app for Mac and PC to convert photos and videos into holographic files using AI-powered Gaussian splatting technology. The software essentially imagines dozens of different viewing angles from a single 2D photograph, creating the illusion of depth and dimension. Once converted, files transfer to the frame via USB-C.
The technology underneath
The frame uses the Hololuminescent Display (HLD) technology Looking Glass announced in 2025, which combines 2D display layers with a 3D holographic volume to show off holograms viewable by multiple people at the same time, without the need for eye-tracking or glasses. This is the core advantage over headset-based approaches: a group of people can gather around and see the same 3D content from their own perspectives without wearing anything.
The device does not require Wi-Fi setup, subscriptions, or specialised 3D equipment. This matters for consumer adoption. No cloud dependency, no subscription treadmill, no need to buy specialised cameras or software licenses. The barrier to entry is genuinely low.
Looking Glass has been chasing this goal since 2019. The company has been committed to making holographic displays the next big thing since 2019, and with Musubi, it may finally be offering its tech at a price that is hard to deny.
Kickstarter, cautiously
The company is taking pre-orders through a Kickstarter campaign that launched today, with first production units scheduled to ship in June 2026. Any Kickstarter campaign carries inherent risk. The hardware world is littered with promising prototypes that became shipping nightmares. But Looking Glass has a track record worth noting. The company is years ahead of the competition in cost, technology, and intellectual property, having already shipped thousands of units while others are still only experimenting in the field.
Still, a consumer product is a different beast from a developer kit. Price pressure, manufacturing scale, and supporting a non-technical customer base all create friction that professional products do not face. The real test is whether the company can deliver Musubi at $149 and actually make it viable as a mass-market object.
For now, the company is betting that ordinary people have been waiting for a reasonably priced way to turn their digital photo collections into something more memorable than a screensaver. They might be right. At this price, Musubi is worth the experiment.