Depth of Field and Other Post-Processing Effects

In order to make scenes look good in your Looking Glass display, it's very important to use post-processing effects, especially depth of field. Depth of field applies an aesthetically pleasing blur to content off of the focal plane. See our 3D design guidelines for more details.

Post-Processing in BiRP

When using Unity's built-in render pipeline, you should leverage our fork of the post-processing stack. This is an additional package that is imported when you import our main Unity plugin. See details on how to use this package here.

Post-Processing in URP

To enable post-processing in URP, select the Hologram Camera and turn on the toggle for URP Post-Processing.

With this enabled, the standard post-processing volume in the scene will affect your scene. Now, it's important to add an override for Depth of Field to the post-processing volume.

We highly recommend using the Bokeh setting in the Depth of Field effect as it gives far superior visual results. Once this is configured, set the Aperture to be very low - in our URP sample scene, I've set it to be 1.5. Then set the focal length to be quite high - I've set it to 80.

A low aperture and a high focal length will result in a heavy bokeh effect - this is what would be used in portrait photography, for example, which is analogous to how we can think about the limited depth range of Looking Glass displays. With both these values set, we now want to set the focal distance to be on the focal plane. In the sample scene, that is roughly a value of 2.

With all this configured, your scene should now look much more aesthetically pleasing! You can continue to use other post-processing effects to improve the scene, including Tonemapping, Bloom, and more.