Leia’s ‘Lume Pad 2’ Brings You an Exquisite Glasses-Free 3D Experience You’ve Never Seen Before

When you think of 3D experiences, one of the first things that comes to mind is heavy eyewear and glasses that sit on your face, and in most cases, give the wearer an eyestrain, headache, dizziness and nausea, or a combination thereof. From 3D calling and video/movie streaming to 3D gaming, sketching, and content creation, Leia Inc.’s Lume Pad 2 is undeniably one of the best 3D AI innovations born from 2023. 

Founded in 2014 and the winner of four CES 2023 Innovation Awards, Leia continues to thrive as a leading provider of “glasses-free” 3D display hardware and content services for mobile devices and automotive. The Silicon Valley company has utilized its core technology, which originated from years of R&D at HP Labs, makes any display of photos and videos completely unparalleled to anything you may have seen before in 3D technology. 

For Leia, providing consumers a “glasses-free” device that allows them to experience truly realistic 3D quality of the world around us, without having to experience the eyestrains, headaches, and dizziness, is what separates the CES award-winning company from other companies who have claimed to have made 3D technology “accessible” and “easy to experience.”

Its Lume Pad 2, which retails for $1,099, completely changes the way we view smart tablets and experience 3D without having the stress of putting heavy eyewear on or investing in an expensive new smart TV – and is well-worth the initial price to actually enjoy the full throttle of the tablet’s 3D capabilities.

Unraveling the Lume Pad 2

The Lume Pad 2, which Luxe Beat Magazine had the opportunity to review prior to its public launch, holds itself out as the “world’s first 3D-AI tablet,” that doesn’t require you to put on any headwear or eyewear. 

By marrying the Lume Pad 2’s award-winning 3D screen with the company’s groundbreaking AI technology, the new tablet does everything from converting your 2D videos you record and automatically converts them into 3D – all by toggling on and off the 2D-3D button.

While the 3D tablet first began shipping to customers in April, SXSW 2023 attendees in Austin were among the first to experience the world’s first 3D-AI tablet. 

Nima Zeighami, Director of Product for Leia Inc, sat down with Luxe Beat to dive deeper into the unique 3D ecosystem Leia has built for all of us to enjoy the 3D experience – without the headache or taking a significant hit to the wallet.

Zeighami, who has spent over 10 years in the immersive technology space, spent his entire professional career working with consumer technology, including VR, AR, 3D, AI, and mobile devices and working with a number of leading brands including Apple, Starbucks, and GMC with their then VR efforts. 

He told LuxeBeat that when Leia first started, a lot of the bigger brands began winding down their 3D initiatives quite significantly, but noted that a lot of the initiatives were focused on “glasses-based” 3D.

A standalone 3D ecosystem

Zeighami referenced Nintendo’s ‘3DS’ device, which he said was a great product, but a poor 3D experience. 

“The games were great, but watching a video or viewing photos on it were really bad. I still loved it, but it’s not a general purpose device. It’s a great product for playing games, but for 3D experiences, it wasn’t a good product,” he told Luxe Beat.

He said that while a few of Leia’s competitors in the space have been able to utilize screens that are bigger or come with higher resolution, nobody has been able to provide “the ecosystem” that  Leia has built into a “standalone package” that begins the moment you first turn on the Lume Pad device. 

Unlike most 3D mobile technology, where you have to buy the 3D TV, then the 3D glasses for everyone in the household, then ensuring you have the right HDMI cable specs for 3D playback, and then plugging it into a 3D blu-ray player, to then spend even more money buying 3D blu-rays that are significantly more expensive than traditional blu-ray discs. In other words, your wallet has just taken a huge hit – just to make sure you’re set up properly.

“For us, we have the ecosystem. If you buy the Lume Pad 2, you can use 3D instantly, as well as having all of your content automatically converted into 3D – whether it’s from your iPhone, Android, or computer. It’s all built into the device and absent renting 3D movies from our library, nothing special needs to be done to enjoy the experience,” Zeighami explained.

For first-time users of Leia’s Lume Pad 2, you have the immediate ability to turn off the 3D display to get to your full 2D resolution. 

Turning to the industry challenges associated with enjoying 3D, such as frequent eyestrain, headaches, and/or dizziness, Zeighami clarified that they haven’t “eliminated” these effects entirely. 

For people who may have eye health issues, where one eye may be weaker than the other eye, or if they have astigmatism, he says there may still be eyestrain, but not nearly as bad as what current glasses-based VR/3D technology brings.

“One thing with VR and AR devices is that you have to set your inner pupillary distance (IPD) whenever you put a device on – the average person normally doesn’t do that,” he noted, adding that with the Lume Pad 2, “you don’t have to set your IPD. The Lume Pad 2 will automatically look comfortable to anyone, because we’re using 3D AI to track and steer the experience towards you.”

He also addressed individuals who may be stereo blind or have a mental health issue that makes it difficult for an individual to see or experience 3D comfortably, pointing to the “Parallax” feature. 

“We don’t just do stereoscopy,” he said, which sends one view to each eye and making it look 3D. Instead, they do parallax, which shows you a novel image in games and apps that support it wherever you’re looking to give you a full 3D parallax view.

The device and its tech, according to Zeighami, are already being used by medical professionals and academia for training purposes to get a better understanding and view into, for example, human anatomy in 3D for professors and students to use. 

Zeighami also made a general comparison between Leia and their competitors, which he did not name with respect to an end-to-end product solution. 

“Nobody has a single device that does it all, end-to-end. We do. Almost every other solution you can think of requires you to plug in a graphics card into a PC, which is obviously not a great solution. Or, it only has a 3D screen, but doesn’t have a 3D camera, or the 2D experience on the device is lacking, or the combination of all of this,” he described.

First Time Users

We asked Leia’s Director of Product where to begin as a first time user, from the moment we unboxed the Lume Pad 2. He said there are three things that he would do first if he was someone using the 3D tablet for the first time:

• Take all your favorite photo and video files (2D and 3D), and connect it with Google Drive. 

You can either plug the tablet into the computer, phone, or access it via the cloud, and from there, watch to see how your favorite files are automatically converted from 2D to 3D on the Lume Pad 2.  

• Visit the Google PlayStore and Leia’s Native ‘Leia App Store’

For the average Android user, you can still access Google’s PlayStore to put your most frequently used apps on the tablet, including Gmail, Google Photos, etc. 

For those who want to dive right into the 3D apps and games, they can head to the device’s pre-installed ‘Leia App Store,’ which contains the most updated listings of all of Leia’s 3D apps, games, and educational resources. 

He suggested updating the Leia App Store app first, and then updating the other apps including LeiaTube, where users can watch all of their YouTube videos, Vimeo, Twitch, etc. in 3D. 

• Play With the Camera

The last thing Zeighami suggested was to have fun with the tablet’s camera, which takes 5K resolution per eye using the rear camera. According to the product developer lead, this is the “highest resolution consumer 3D camera ever shipped.”

“I would either go take some photos and videos using the front or rear-facing camera – or open up LeiaChat and try to chat with someone else who may also have the Lume Pad 2, to experience 3D in real-time,” he shared.

All of the photos and videos you take automatically store as a JPEG and MP4, respectively. However, all of the accepted file formats (shared below) are backwards compatible and viewable in 2D instantly and can be shared/viewed across all other devices. 

Getting to Know the Other Features

The Crisp Display

At first glance, the Lume Pad 2’s 12.4-inch screen projects out a bright 2D picture (2560×1600), with a high-end 16:10 display for a high-end Android tablet – and they aren’t kidding. For us, this was something we hadn’t seen before. 

Switching Between 2D and 3D

It’s SUPER easy!  Everything you do on the tablet transforms in real-time when you toggle the 2D/3D converter button on/off.  

Powered by nanotechnology, the tablet’s single optical layer, which sits underneath the LCD display, makes a Diffractive Lightfield Backlighting (DLB) possible – in other words, that 3D pop-out you see. 

An LCD screen’s brightness is displayed through a backlight (a piece of glass) and regular backlights (smoother pieces of glass) that allow the light to shine through – all behind your LCD screen.

For Leia, they have two backlights. “The DLB, that nanolithography is creating a bunch of structures in that backlight, which makes it so the photons coming out of it are actually being sent different directions before it even hits the LCD color,” Zeighami told Luxe Beat. 

This effectively allows users to turn it off entirely, giving you the full-resolution, pristine 2D, which other devices don’t do. “Now, when that backlight is diffracting that light, it’s sending it in eight discrete views that are super tight,” he added. 

Leia is essentially able to take those eight views and simulate them into hundreds of unique novel views that seem very realistic, eliminating the “dead zone” giving you that very comfortable and wide-view 3D experience.

LeiaPlayer & LeiaFlix

Perhaps one of the coolest features the Lume Pad 2 offers is its native video player, LeiaPlayer, where all the magic really happens. Not only does it play your 3D images and videos, it also is able to bring your 2D media content to life – from touching up your own 3D media that may have been created outside of the Leia ecosystem to actually watching your favorite movies in 3D. 

LeiaFlix, which is Leia’s native 3D movie theater, allows you to purchase some of your favorite Hollywood blockbusters in amazing 3D quality to watch – again, all without special glasses.

The video player handles a host of image and video formats, including, but not limited to JPEG, PNG, HEIC, MP4, MKV, WEBM, and VR180.  

If you are a John Wick fan, definitely check out and watch John Wick: Chapter 4, but you can’t go wrong with any of the Marvel or DC movies or the Avatar series.

Cloud-Based APIs to Enhance the 2D-3D Conversion

In July, the company announced a significant expansion of its LeiaPix 2D-to-3D conversion offerings, powered by its proprietary AI models, that offers state-of-the-art depth estimation and novel view synthesis with pristine quality. 

Unlike other platforms that require all that hefty software investments, Leia’s cloud APIs are accessible on-demand with a device connected to WiFi. 

With all eyes on AI right now and its ethical use, specifically when it comes to training these systems and algorithms, Leia’s AI models are trained on a private dataset of 3D images that respect the integrity of copyrighted materials. It also employs Nvidia GPUs in the Cloud to create that synthetic depth and novel viewpoints for any 2D image with that stunning level of accuracy that rightfully earned the Lume Pad its award-winning recognition. 

For developers, these new cloud-based APIs are a major step forward, as they can now easily integrate LeiaPix conversion capabilities into their own apps or websites, bringing the beauty of depth animations to their own customers.

“Innovation is a core aspect of Leia’s culture and empowering others to be creative with their own content, through our technology, continues to be a priority for us,” said David Fattal, CEO of Leia Inc. in a previous announcement. “Our new cloud-based APIs are a major milestone in that regard, offering the magic of 2D-3D conversion to anyone, on any device.” 

World Photography Day 2023

Leia is currently running a contest through the end of August in celebration of World Photography Day 2023, where Lume Pad 2 and LeiaDream users can animate their photos with LeiaPix Converter, for a chance to win a Lume Pad 2 or an Amazon gift card.