welcome to the expert talks by kalkine tv i'm sage today's guest is bruce dell
ceo of axiom holographics based in brisbane queensland axiom holographics is a world leader
in holographic production the global holographic display market size was valued at 1.13 billion
dollars in 2020 and this is projected to reach 11.65 billion dollars by 2030. so here to tell
us more about this fascinating space we have bruce stell the ceo of axiom holographics
so welcome to the show bruce thank you sage so glad to have you with us and look at your
background i mean already you're blowing us away and you haven't even said much more than hello
so axiom holographics is a quiet achiever based in brisbane a world leader in holographic production
can you elaborate on how holograms and virtual reality can be integrated into business please
sure sure so first of all uh we make a big cut between holograms and virtual reality
so this is something a lot of people don't understand the difference so virtual reality
is where you put screens over your eyes and holograms is where you actually use lasers
to project everything in the air now you still do need glasses but they're actually made of gloves
so you you see through them just like the glasses you would use at the 3d movies but holograms are i
suppose a little bit different to what people are used to as in if i go to a 3d movie say i watch
the lion king in 3d i can't hop up from my seat walk down to an elephant that came off a screen
and walk around him and see him from all sides but with holograms you can do that so holograms are a
new technology that actually projects things in the air people can walk around and see it from
all sides they put their hands straight through it you can see those people that they got bit by a
dinosaur on the screen there and everything just seems very solid and it has a lot of different
applications i think um i think when we talk about technology revolutions we've had cars we've had
electricity telephones computers tvs and people say what is the next big technology revolution
well according to the media uh for for the last 40 years everyone's been telling us that holograms
will eventually be here eventually holograms will be in our day-to-day lives in the future
and um so that's what we're up to hologram technology has existed for probably about 10
years now but it's been so expensive that it's only been used by nasa and top science centers
we found a way to produce hologram technology for about five percent of the cost
so for example there are some universities uh monash university has a large hologram room
that they got from america and that's about three million dollars we produce
similar devices i'd say they're better but i'm biased for about 150 000 mark so this means that
hologram technology now moves into universities education schools architecture and entertainment
you can see a lot of the things behind me is uh entertainment-based hologram technology
that's fantastic thank you so much bruce what an exciting space so we've noticed that the
transfer of information is evolving through the ages and you took us through a timeline there
and i just can't wait to see how information will be transferred through holograms for art science
entertainment um so thank you so much for sharing your insights what are the other
barriers preventing wider adoption however apart from money of this fantastic technology
the biggest barrier to any sort of hardware technology
is content so for example virtual reality helmets have existed for a lot longer than people realize
so virtual reality helmets about 20 years ago tried to launch and they went to the various
games companies and they said we have virtual reality helmets could you make some games for them
now the games company said well how many virtual reality helmets have sold because if there's
millions of them then we will sell millions of games if there's 10 of them we'll sell 10 games
and the virtual reality companies would say well we haven't really sold that many yet but
if you make games then maybe people will will buy the virtual reality helmets and this will
be able to get off the ground and the games companies couldn't take that sort of gamble
so virtual reality sort of wandered around for 12 years lost having no content and then uh in
more recent times groups like oculus rift uh got organized enough and had enough money behind them
to uh to join up with various games producers and so that's how we got the modern world of virtual
reality now for us we would have bumped into exactly the same problem where we'd
say we've got hologram rooms we've got hologram tunnels we've got all sorts of hologram devices
please can someone make make content for these we didn't want to go out begging as virtual reality
had tried that not done so well in the past so instead we built an artificial intelligence so
this will sound very bizarre but we're the first company in the world that produces large
numbers of games yet we do not employ a single human programmer in the games division not one
line of code in anything you're seeing behind me was written by a human being
so we basically made this new way where the artists simply answer questions computer takes
all that information and in 27 seconds it writes the program for them and so because of that we've
produced so much content so many games we've we've got a museum based content we've got um monster
escape rooms lots of hologram arcade machines hologram birthday party content so much stuff
so we're producing massive amounts of content because the ai is doing all the programming
that is amazing thank you bruce i just watched a program about the history of the loom and how they
transferred patterns onto fabric and what you've just said kind of mirrors that in a 21st century
way that's fantastic so bruce we notice this sort of deep technology sometimes scares people
people don't understand where the developers are coming from or in your case how ai is making games
can people benefit from utilizing technology that they don't understand completely in your opinion
look when it comes to understanding i've had some very strange reactions uh i remember
we had some cleaners here who didn't speak english and uh one afternoon i said oh uh this room
because they were saying what is this room what is this room we clean it after hours what's it for
and i said i'll turn it on now to them this was almost like witchcraft oh my goodness like
turtles appeared in the air swimming all around them and fish and things and we've had a lot of
very very strange reactions from people another time a person came to visit we put them into
the hologram room and we turned on a copy of our boardroom upstairs so they were in a hologram of
our boardroom then later on we were having our meeting in our boardroom and the person all of
a sudden went and we said what's wrong and he said i'm sorry for a second there my brain got confused
and i wasn't sure if i was in the hologram or the the real thing so this is a technology
that does require getting some use to uh we had a hologram of me downstairs for a while in one of
the rooms and every time people went in they went oh hi oh wait a minute that's not you that's the
the other you the hologram you so it is a little bit scary in ways i think um and definitely there
are questions so for example we are making at the moment ai based hologram workers uh to be like
tour guides in our hologram entertainment centers um and they'll sort of introduce themselves talk
to people answer all of their questions so some people do ask about you know will will this
technology take away jobs or things like that and that is definitely a another discussion for
others to be had how does not just us how does the world responsibly as technology continues to take
more and more jobs as amazon replaces shopping malls as autonomous vehicles um where does that
all go and i think that's something that everyone together eventually needs to wake up to coming
problems and a lot of wise people need to sit down and say do we need to restructure society in some
big ways to accommodate this so yes hologram technology does speed up some of those problems
that technology does bring along the way i sort of justify it to myself is hologram technology was on
the way everyone was on their way you know if only we could get there and i think everyone thought it
was about 30 years away we managed to move a lot quicker than everyone else we managed to patent
everything i think we sort of locked down most of the hologram future will be just in our company
and um so yeah for for us there are a few moral decisions to be made a few scary things to be
to be sort of sorted out but there's also a moral side to holograms as well so one of the other
things we do is world history is being destroyed what i mean by that is sometimes i mean we saw the
tragic situation where the taliban blew up the buddhas in afghanistan or notre dame cathedral
burns down uh there are earthquakes sometimes that destroy historical places and sometimes
the worst offenders when it comes to destroying history is actually the archaeologists themselves
when they dig up places like the indus valley they take lots of photos and go home
and the wind and the waves and the weather come and slowly start to destroy it so the moral side
i think to what we're doing is we're doing a lot of work in scanning in real world places
converting that into holograms so god forbid you know these things should get damaged but
if they do at least we have a permanent lasting record we also can work on scanning in real
world places and by having them in our hologram entertainment centers making a commercial model
that returns a percentage back to the upkeep of the real world places there is
that moral side to it in preserving history i think future generations will look back
and be glad that we did what we did and uh managed to make a holographic record of things
uh whatever gets lost between now and then exactly and i'm seeing that uh people are utilizing
the vr technology was a little bit different to holographics that you outlined earlier in helping
mental health barriers be improved and things like that maybe overcoming fears and things like that
and you mentioned that the cleaners had a bit of a almost spiritual experience when they faced the
hologram i i can i can understand what they mean i think it would be um very exciting and so exciting
that just the lines of reality are blurred i remember the first time i watched a 3d movie and
i was stretching my hands out thinking that those objects were really real but it stimulated me in
a way that i wanted to know more and i and i just the need for knowledge and the need to be part of
this space for me is what actually grew out of my first contact with it thank you bruce for sharing
your passion for what you do and i've noticed that maybe your clients are overseas when will
australia get to experience a lot more of the work that's coming out of your showroom and how will
the increase of gaming and holographic exhibitions impact the production of axiom holographics please
well we've opened two hologram entertainment centers um and we're going to be opening quite
a few more over the next two years uh so actually we have five of them around the world but two of
them are in australia these are places where a family goes and they go into a hologram room
and then uh they can do dinosaurs or underwater or hollow sports or monster escape rooms all sorts
of different things but they go through like 10 different experiences so say you fly with
the pterodactyls or you go underwater with the underwater dinosaurs or you have a stampede of
triceratops has come towards you uh they also play hologram arcade machines you've seen them behind
me in the picture like normal arcade machines except the characters are all flying around in
the air with you can see these ladies here playing a game with crocodiles snapping fish and then they
win prizes prizes fall down what we're looking at at the moment is a holographic tunnel that's a
large tunnel that you walk through with your family this was going to come out in brisbane
museum it was going to be its big debut at the world science festival and then the floods came
and flooded the brisbane museum so unfortunately uh all of the people who bought tickets quite
a lot of tickets all got their money back and um they didn't get to go through the dinosaur tunnel
at the moment we're contacting all the other museums in in australia and
making arrangements by little bit by little bit australia will always be first in this sort of
thing we'll be bringing out these hologram tunnels hologram entertainment centers and all sorts of
other interesting things thank you bruce i mean projections and led screens get close
but it's not the same as a hologram so we'd love to see some here in sydney soon vivid's
coming up are there any plans to join uh or to exhibit at vivid in the near future
i didn't know vivid was coming up soon maybe i should get on my phone and talk to vivid
yes once you jump off the call with us um so bruce as we wind up the discussion now
um could you tell us a little bit about the future goals and the plans to build more holographic
entertainment centers please sure so um i i know this is a terribly arrogant thing to say i think
the world isn't fun enough um i say to myself like what is there really to do i can go bowling
time zone in arcades and places like that are good but they're all they're all buying their equipment
from exactly the same places so whichever one i go to it's always the same if i go overseas
it's always the same so my mission is to make the world have a lot more interesting fun attractions
than um than has existed before i think the future for us is we're producing stuff at such
a high rate with such a wonderful team here and we're just moving faster and faster and faster so
i think we're going to be a major exporter from australia of hologram technology all over the
world we've already opened up our office in europe in finland if um if putin doesn't attack it but uh
the offense over in finland and at the moment we're planning our office over in austin texas
oh fantastic austin texas is a very exciting place to be in america for tech at the moment
congratulations on that and your expansion goals in finland as well bruce we really do appreciate
your insights and your mission to make the world a more fun place i can see it having
some major benefits thank you so much for your insights hope you enjoy the rest of your day
thank you so much for having us and if you just joined us we had a very interesting discussion
bruce dell he's the ceo of axiom holographics if you missed any part of that interview please head
to calkin media's youtube channel and keep watching for more of these excellent expert
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