holus scam

Recently, we posted an article about a new awesome device you can place on your tabletop and make your games three dimensional, called Holus. Unfortunately, it has come to our attention that this might possibly be a very good scam!

holus 3
Holus

 

Holus has raised more than $250,000 (Canadian) in their Kickstarter campaign. Thanks to Raphael De Courville, we now think that we shouldn’t have posted the original article in the first place, because, it seems that Holus could indeed be a “fraud”, or a better word would be, an alleged “scam”. Read what Raphael researched and wrote. You can read his original article at: Is Holus about to become the most successful scam in the history of Kickstarter?

In their video, the Holus creators (a Vancouver based startup called H+ Technology) are using photorealistic renderings to make their product look like a perfect volumetric display.

Beauty is in the CGI of the beholder

 

So what about the motion tracking they are showing in the video? H+ says:

It changes the image so we actually get different perspectives. As a result, we have now turned it into a proper hologram.

Using a smartphone orientation sensors to rotate a model in the Holus.

This is a cool trick but don’t be fooled: while the model on the screen is rotated, the image is still a flat plane since both eyes are looking at the same image (of course, this is hard to see in a 2D video).

The Holus is nothing more than a standard computer monitor lying on top of a glass pyramid. In other words, in it’s current form, the Holus is unlikely to display anything more impressive than four distinct 2D views, reflected in four panes of glass. Or as someone on Reddit brilliantly said: “This is a strange 4 sided semi transparent TV.”

H+ Technology said they are exploring using a lenticular display (the same 3D technology used in the Nintendo 3DS for example) but it looks like this is not past the R&D phase yet. Even if Holus did show a prototype that solved the many issues of lenticular displays, it won’t look anything like the promo video simply because reflected light cannot do that.

To read the full article, head over to Raphael’s page.

Holus also (allegedly) created numerous fake accounts on Kickstarter and posted glaringly positive messages in favor of the project. The accounts were just 1 day old!

Another thing that we noticed is that, the website of H+, the creators of Holus, is missing many pages (or has a lot of bad links). Click on Press -> In the news -> 404 error. Try Contact and you’ll be taken here: https://www.hplustech.com/new-folder/ This cannot be expected from true professionals, who by the way are running a ground breaking technology company. Something smells fishy, and it might be Holus…

We contacted H+ Technologies for a response to these allegations, they sent us this link: https://vimeo.com/channels/933372

Related links

Holus: Interactive Tabletop 3D “Holographic” Display

Did Holus scam 200.000$ of Kickstarter backers using a 19th century parlor trick?

Holus: H+ Technology back-pedals in the wake of “holoscam“ backlash

Is Holus about to become the most successful scam in the history of Kickstarter?

H+ Technology’s official website

Holus Kickstarter Campaign

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