I always get frustrated when people refer to any random pseudo-3D gimmick as a hologram. A hologram is a specific type of technology which records interference patterns from which an approximation of the original light field can be reconstructed, such that you can look at it from different angles and see the original scene from different angles.<p>Other forms of pseudo-3D, like these human-shaped rear projections screens or people spliced into a scene using chroma keying and multiple camera angles (as CNN's "holographic interview" works), are not holograms.<p>There are people at MIT who are working on real holographic video, but of course, the technology has some substantial limitations: <a href="http://obm.media.mit.edu/" rel="nofollow">http://obm.media.mit.edu/</a><p>There's nothing wrong with alternative forms of presenting pseudo-3D imagery and video. But I wish people didn't call it all "holograms", because that leads to confusion rather than clarifying what's going on.
I saw a couple of these a while ago at London Luton airport. Personally, I found the experience profoundly dehumanizing, and thought it rather depressing to be talked to by a life-sized, talking, cardboard cut-out.<p>It's a neat idea for sure, but my preference is for, well, anything that doesn't look so human and yet so fake at the same time.
My local hospital has one of these in the lobby. It's scary quite how realistically 'hologram-like' it looks from a distance: from the corner of my eye, I took it for a real person at first, and only realized that it didn't look quite fully 3D when I looked directly at it.<p>Once you get closer up you see that it's a rear projector with a rigid free-standing screen precisely cut to the outline of the avatar, but even from that close it still looks surprisingly good. Kudos to whichever company makes these (unfortunately the article doesn't mention which, and I didn't notice any branding on the one I saw). It'll be interesting to see these if they get them to be minimally interactive, to the point where you could ask them "Where is the check-in desk?" and have them reply with pre-recorded directions.
I felt uncomfortable watching the video, mostly due to the way they played the sex fantasy card.<p>"I can be used for just about anything, I can sing what you want, dress the way you want, and be.. just about anything you want me to be * blink *"
For some reason I thought this blog was one of those futuristic fictional news sites, but I just realized it's more like future news today, and this is real. Yikes. That's pretty depressing that the company (or whoever actually made this) decided to make this garbage. Not that I expect holograms-as-people to get good enough to be accepted by ordinary people in my lifetime (since it's not just about making a realistic projection, there's the whole AI problem too. Also the fact that it is weird). But for technophobes, this kind of stuff just reinforces the idea that technology is cold and robotic and can't mesh with what we do as humans, which is frustrating for companies who are trying to reverse that thinking.
My local supermarket has just got one of these. They've experimented with the location, and now that it's in a corner with the projector hidden behind a curtain with a circle cut out for the lens, it's not as obviously rubbish and the effect almost works if you look out of the corner of your eye.<p>But it is still just a projector putting a flat image on a piece of smokey perspex.<p>(My supermarket doesn't have the audio turned up loud enough, so I have no idea what it's trying to sell me.)