Workers fed up staring at endless Zoom calls with colleagues in tiny, pixelated boxes on a laptop screen are being offered a high-resolution alternative — a holographic co-worker beamed directly into the home.
"Holoportation" firm Portl has developed a human-sized booth that could reinvigorate Covid-era working from home life — or feel just a little too invasive for some.
The machines, about as big as a red phone box, can be equipped with technology to allow real-time video conferencing with high-definition representations of other people.
There is also an artificial intelligence-programmed upgrade package enabling conversations with historical figures and deceased relatives, so long as the necessary memory data is held on its hard drive.
Portl founder David Nussbaum, whose previous company digitally resurrected rapper Tupac Shakur and 80s US president Ronald Reagan, said the booth could help connect “families that haven’t seen each other in months” due to shielding in the pandemic.
Each hologram booth is seven feet high (2.1m), five feet wide (1.5m) and two feet deep (0.6m).
It uses a stretched transparent LCD 4K screen embedded into a lightbox to help imply 3D-depth inside the space.
The person whose likeness is seen by the recipient records their footage in front of a white screen via a webcam.
US-based Portl said the invention encourages “free-flowing conversations with life-sized holograms beamed into a freestanding device”.
Prices starting at about £45,000 for the machines, rising to £64,000 for an AI add-on called StoryFile, which specialises in archiving hologram recordings so future generations might question a historical figure or discover more about the life of a late relative through an interactive recorded conversation.
Heather Smith, chief executive of StoryFile, said: “It allows you to look at an individual, feel as if they’re there, feel their presence, see their body language, see all the non-verbal cues and feel as if you’ve actually talked to that individual.”
A smaller desktop version of the device is planned for the future, which the company said should be cheaper, and could resemble a high-res version of Princess Leia beamed from R2-D2 in Star Wars.
Dave Collins, co-founder of London’s PowerStation Studios, said: “I could see a new version of the internet café where people go to a business to holo-conference with their family, which would be great in a mid-pandemic world.
“But will it replace Zoom? Not yet. The ability to have multiple people, screen-sharing and chat at a very affordable price makes Zoom the winner for now."
