Be there, or "Beam" there
- dollarpoh
- Oct 21, 2020
- 7 min read
Some of my favourite lectures during my MBA were the ones that had guest speakers on them. Luxury Strategy, Pathways to Entrepreneurial Success, Achieving Strategic Agility, and Channel and Salesforce Management were some of the courses during which the professors arranged for a minimum of 5 guest speakers throughout the course. Other lecturers spoke about their desire to bring in certain guest speakers and the various reasons why they’ve either had to cancel or substitute the speakers. This was mostly due to travel complexity, last minute changes in availability, or just life happening.
What if we lived in a world where speakers didn’t have to travel physically to share their knowledge? Imagine what your business model could look like if, as a coach or motivational speaker, you can charge out rates to be present at multiple venues in one day. Your business would become infinitely scalable overnight and you can impact much more people than you could have ever dreamt of.
If holoportation is something that interests you, read on for a brief introduction into how this technology works and to learn more about some of the companies building it.
What is Holoportation?
Technology has become such an integral part of our everyday lives that we tend to take a lot of it for granted. However, from Jet Suits to robot assistants, a lot of technology still stand out as being otherworldly or distinctly futuristic. Holoportation is one of such otherworldly technologies in my opinion because it sparks a visceral feeling of living in the future or in a sci-fi movie.
"Holoportation" is derived from holographic teleportation, and describes the technology that allows high-quality 3D models of people or objects to be reconstructed and transmitted (beamed) anywhere in the world and in real-time. It is the latest form of mixed reality technology and allows you to teleport your holographic presence into a different location.
Imagine being in a room with your colleague from the New York office whilst you’re sipping from a mug of freshly brewed coffee in the City of London. Not because they are physically there, and not because you are watching them on screen, but because there’s a physical manifestation of their bodies right in front of you - their holograms. Imagine if you could abandon Zoom game nights with your friends and have everyone gathered in the same room, laughing, joking, interacting, but all without having to get in a car and drive over there (and with a zero risk of contracting COVID). This is holoportation.
Is this even real?
As technology has advanced over the last 100 years, we've focused our attention on screens. Most advancements in augmented reality and virtual reality have focused on bringing our screens to life. We have limited ourselves to the 2D world of monitors and pixels, but not anymore. Holoportation is disruptive because it breaks this 2D blueprint. It's a 3D technology where people, not devices, are at the centre of our human experiences.
Companies such as Microsoft and Facebook are working really hard to make this a reality of our everyday live but I’ll like to highlight a lesser-known company that’s currently released products to assist holoportation.
A Los Angeles based company called Portl Hologram has launched at-home hologram machines worth $60,000 that can help mimic the experience of being in the same room with friends and colleagues throught phone-booth-sized machines that can beam AI-powered holograms into your home. See the video below for more details.
How Holoportation Works
Holoportation combines world-leading augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) display technologies with advanced 3D capture systems. The system captures the full person or object (360 degrees) and transmits the capture to remote participants in real-time.
Several companies are working on holoportation technology, with tech giant Microsoft being the most well-known. How each company or research lab approaches this technology will be slightly different depending on their specific holoportation goals. With that said, the fundamentals of this technology will be mostly the same. For example let’s consider how holoportation works at Microsoft:
3D capture - Microsoft created 3D capture cameras that are placed strategically around a physical space. These cameras are tasked with capturing the objects from a different angle or viewpoint.
The data from these cameras are fused together to create a temporally consistent model of the objects (holograms).
Once the models have been constructed, they can be textured and compressed.
Once compressed, the data (of the now textured 3D model) can be transmitted to a different location.
Users in a different location wearing a holoportation headset called HoloLens, can see the object as though it is co-present in their space.
With Microsoft's technology, both users need to be in a 3D capture environment and wear the HoloLens device to see each other.
Facebook's technology also relies on the use of wearable devices such as the Oculus to deliver these Mixed Reality experiences.
You would agree with me that wearing devices that look like this could feel a little ridiculous due to its size and Facebook has now announced a collaboration with Luxoticca to pare down these devices and make them, well, more realistic, pun intended, for the wearer. How cool!
Another exciting element of Microsoft's holoportation technology is that you can record your interactions and replay them. This means you can relive memories more tangibly than merely watching a video. Or you can finally settle that argument about whether you really said that thing you're adamant you didn't. You can also scale the holoported recording up or down. So if you wanted to watch a 3D version of your daughter opening her Christmas presents, but you don't have lots of space, you can watch a scaled-down version on your kitchen table.
Microsoft is committed to expanding its research into holoportation and pushing the boundaries of what's possible. Recently, they took the technology out of the studio and into a car to prove that holoportation can be mobile. Pulling this off required some tweaks to the tech, namely reducing the bandwidth requirements by 97% whilst still maintaining graphical fidelity[1].
Why should you care?
We spend an excessive amount of time, money, and CO2 to be physically present in spaces with other people. Video conferencing and audio technology has come a long way, allowing us to communicate from different locations with relative ease, but it's not perfect. People might be travelling across countries or continents for business less than they were a few decades ago, but they're still doing it. They're not doing it because they love spending money or warming the earth; they do it because talking through a screen is less effective, efficient, and fulfilling than talking face-to-face in person. Put simply, there's a significant gap between high-end telecommunication tools and being physically present.
Why Holoportation Is Being Dubbed "The Next Big Thing" in Education
There's a lot of buzz surrounding the use of holoportation in schools. Over the last several decades, there's been a push to make learning more interactive and immersive for students of all ages. It should come as no surprise that people, whether 4 years old or 40 years old, learn more effectively when they feel passionate and excited about a subject.
The problem is, our current technology limits our immersion. Screens and textbooks can only go so far, and that's why field trips to historical landmarks or points of natural beauty have always been a part of school curriculums. You can probably vividly remember school field trips you've been on but have fewer memories in the classroom. You can probably remember creating a white flame with magnesium and a bunsen burner in your chemistry class, but less so all of those detailed pictures of an atom.
Due to expense, these more immersive and interactive experiences are infrequent in schools. Students often go on one or two field trips a year. But with holoportation technology, they can visit historical landmarks every day. Holoportation promotes engagement and motivation and also allows all students to participate equally. Often not all students can go on school trips, either due to health concerns or money constraints. Holoportation can become an equalizer in this way.
With the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic, it's easy to see how holoportation in education could be a game-changer. While students in the UK are currently back at school, it's not yet clear whether the situation will change, and they will have to learn remotely again. The gap in experiences is already showing for students who have gone to University this September. A TikTok video by a geography student detailed how his experience was hindered compared to his flatmate who was studying Computer Science. He was no longer able to go on a field trip due to coronavirus, so instead had to Google the plant life in that area and try to identify it using images on Google.
With holoportation, we're not far off a Ready Player One version of schooling.
Other Applications of Holoportation
Holoportation is a game-changer for telecommunications, but its applications don't stop there. Here are some other uses for this state-of-the-art technology.
Real estate - Architects and realtors can showcase buildings without having to be physically present. Read more here.
Fashion: Designers can use holoportation to forgo the expense of fashion shows, by allowing retailers to see new styles on a model close up, but without having to travel the world.
Social: Hanging out with loved ones who live in different countries.
Surveillance: It's unlikely that holoportation 3D capture technology will replace CCTV in public places anytime soon, but it's a possibility for the future. In highly secure areas like Airports, the technology could be used to capture events in real time and beam to security experts. Even the best CCTV cameras can often be less than useful due to unclear angles.
Gaming: Playing games in a fully immersive virtual environment has been a massive desire for gamers for many decades now, and we're getting so close. Facebook in particular is at the forefront of using AR and VR experiences in the gaming world through the Oculus.
Telemedicine: NASA contractor Aexa Aerospace, creators of holoportation system HoloWizard, demonstrated how holoportation can be used to remotely administer a stroke exam. They believe this technology could be used to coach users on proper physiotherapy techniques, among other things[2].
Shopping / commerce: Shoppers don't have to be physically present in-store to get a full shopping experience. They can get beamed into a reconstructed version of the store, or even the real store, and get to experience the product attributes just as they would in real life.
A Holographic Future
Holoportation technology has the potential to disrupt almost every industry and transform the way we live and work. Our education can become more immersive, but so can our entertainment (like games and movies). It might not be long until your doctor teleports into your living room for a checkup exam. The possibilities are endless, and they're coming soon.
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/holoportation-3/
[2] https://www.newswire.com/news/aexa-aerospace-demonstrates-holographic-teleportation-for-telemedicine-21183129
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