Building the World’s First Hologram CMS at Looking Glass Factory

May 2023 - March 2025

When I joined Looking Glass Factory as a Senior Full-Stack Engineer, I knew I was stepping into something unique. This wasn’t just another SaaS company—they were building holographic displays and trying to create an entire ecosystem around 3D content. My mission? Architect and build blocks.glass, the first-ever content sharing platform for holograms.

Think of it as YouTube or Instagram, but for holographic 3D content. No one had done this before. There was no playbook.

The Scale: 100,000+ Digital Assets

Over the course of nearly two years, we deployed over 100,000 digital assets through the platform. Holograms, 3D models, lightfield images, volumetric videos—all kinds of content that needed to be processed, stored, displayed, and delivered to holographic displays around the world.

The technical challenges were fascinating:

• How do you efficiently store and serve multi-gigabyte holographic files?
• How do you create a content discovery system for 3D assets?
• How do you handle IoT device management when users have holographic displays syncing content?
• How do you build a platform that works for both creators and consumers?

Making It Fast: 70% Performance Improvement

One of my proudest achievements was optimizing our database architecture. We were running complex Postgres queries that were causing page load times to drag. Users would wait several seconds just to browse content—unacceptable for a modern web app.

I dove deep into query optimization, indexing strategies, and database schema redesign. The result? 70% reduction in page load times. What used to take 5-6 seconds now loaded in under 2 seconds. For a content platform, that kind of performance improvement directly translates to better user engagement and retention.

Building the Business: Payment Infrastructure

A platform is nothing without a sustainable business model. I implemented our entire payment processing infrastructure, integrating with Webflow and Shopify to support SaaS subscriptions and product sales.

This involved:

• Stripe integration for recurring billing and subscription management
• Webhook handling for real-time payment events
• User management tied to subscription tiers
• Seamless checkout experiences that didn’t break the immersive nature of browsing holographic content

Getting payments right is critical—it’s the foundation of the company’s revenue. Every transaction had to be smooth, secure, and reliable.

AI Integration: Two Groundbreaking Projects

As AI exploded in 2023-2024, we saw opportunities to push the boundaries of what holographic displays could do. I led the integration of two distinct AI systems:

1. Liteforms: Conversational AI Holographic Assistants

I integrated ChatGPT-powered conversational AI into our Liteforms platform, creating interactive holographic characters that users could actually talk with. This wasn’t just a gimmick—it combined:

• Large language models (LLMs) for natural conversation
• Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to ground responses in specific brand knowledge
• Real-time speech processing for seamless voice interaction
• 3D character rendering synchronized with conversational flow

The result? Holographic chatbots that brands could customize with their entire product catalog and service offerings. Imagine walking up to a holographic retail assistant that not only looks three-dimensional but can answer questions about products, make recommendations, and engage in natural dialogue—all without typing.

This was cutting-edge stuff—implementing RAG for holographic conversational AI before it became mainstream.

2. Text-to-Hologram: ComfyUI Generation Pipeline

The second AI project was equally innovative: a remote ComfyUI server configured behind a FastAPI backend, creating a complete “text-to-hologram” pipeline.

Here’s what made it special:

• Dual output generation: A single text prompt would generate both an image AND its corresponding depth map
• Depth map processing: The depth maps were crucial for creating the parallax effect on Looking Glass’s light-field displays
• API-driven workflow: FastAPI wrapper made it easy for the web platform to request hologram-ready assets
• Remote GPU infrastructure: ComfyUI server ran on dedicated hardware, scaling independently from the web app

This system democratized hologram creation. Instead of needing 3D modeling skills or expensive equipment, users could simply describe what they wanted—“a cyberpunk city at night with neon reflections”—and get back a hologram-ready asset with proper depth information for the light-field display.

It was a perfect intersection of generative AI, computer vision, and holographic display technology.

Revolutionizing the Frontend: Design Systems & 3D Web

I led a major overhaul of our frontend development process by introducing:

Modern Design Workflow

• Storybook for component development and documentation
• Mobile-first design principles ensuring our platform worked beautifully on all devices
• Figma + Tailwind integration creating a seamless designer-to-developer workflow

3D Web Experiences

This is where my background in creative technology really shined. I integrated:

• Three.js and React Three Fiber for real-time 3D rendering in the browser
• Framer Motion for smooth, delightful animations
• WebGL optimizations to ensure 3D content loaded quickly even on slower devices

Users could preview holographic content directly in their browser before syncing it to their Looking Glass display. The web app itself became an immersive experience.

Automation: Unity Code Generation Pipeline

One of the most technically interesting problems was keeping our Unity SDK in sync with our web platform. We had APIs for content management, user authentication, device syncing—and all of it needed C# code on the Unity side.

I designed an automated build pipeline that:

1. Read our OpenAPI specifications from the Next.js codebase
2. Automatically generated type-safe C# code for Unity
3. Ran on every deployment, ensuring Unity developers always had up-to-date SDK code

This eliminated manual errors, reduced development friction, and accelerated our release cycles. Developers could trust that the Unity SDK would always match the web API.

The IoT Challenge: Holographic Displays Everywhere

What made this project particularly complex was the IoT dimension. We weren’t just building a web app—we were building a platform that had to communicate with thousands of holographic displays, each running custom firmware, each owned by individual users or businesses.

This meant dealing with:

• Device authentication and pairing
• Content synchronization across unreliable networks
• Version management when displays had different firmware
• Real-time updates when users published new content

It was full-stack in the truest sense—from React components in the browser to Postgres queries on the backend to firmware communication protocols for hardware devices.

What I Learned

This role pushed me in every direction:

1. Architecting at scale - Designing systems that handle 100k+ assets isn’t trivial
2. Database optimization - Real performance gains come from understanding your data layer
3. Product thinking - Building features that users actually need and enjoy
4. AI integration - Practical applications of LLMs beyond chatbots
5. IoT complexity - Software + hardware ecosystems are a whole different beast
6. Design systems - Establishing processes that help teams move faster
7. Business impact - My code directly affected revenue and user growth

Reflections

Looking Glass Factory was a wild ride. Building the first hologram sharing platform meant solving problems no one had solved before. There were no Stack Overflow answers for “how to optimize lightfield image delivery to IoT holographic displays.”

What made it special was the intersection of cutting-edge hardware (holographic displays), modern web development (React, Next.js, TypeScript), AI innovation (RAG, LLMs), and creative content (3D art, volumetric video).

It reinforced something I’ve always believed: the most interesting work happens at the intersections—where technology meets art, where web meets hardware, where engineering meets creativity.

Today, when I’m building immersive installations or working on live visual productions, the systems thinking and full-stack expertise I developed at Looking Glass Factory continue to inform how I approach complex technical challenges.

Tech Stack: React, Next.js, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, AWS, Three.js, React Three Fiber, Framer Motion, Tailwind CSS, Figma, Storybook, Unity (C#), OpenAPI, Stripe, RAG/LLMs, IoT, WebGL

Team: Senior Full-Stack Engineer

Impact:

• 100,000+ digital assets deployed
• 70% reduction in page load times
• First-ever hologram content sharing platform

Location: Remote / San Francisco