What if you could preserve the people you love, or the stories they have to tell, in
a way that makes it feel like they’re right next to you?
AR and VR have the potential to dramatically change everything from gaming to entertainment
to training for a new job.
But they also have the potential to impact our memories — not just the moments we remember,
but actual living testimonies — and how we interact with people after they’re gone.
I can like go back into myself, right?
Whoa… oh my God.
She’s so little.
Ashley Scott is a Los Angeles-based actress and interior designer.
She’s also a mom, which is worth noting because she’s one of the few people in the
world who has turned her kids into holograms.
I was still kind of keeping up with the casting calls and stuff that were rolling through
my email, and I saw something for a mom and a baby, and I thought, “Oh, that’s me!
I can do that!”
For me it just didn’t even compute what that would entail, or how real it was, the
virtual reality of it.
This “mom and baby” casting call led her to 8i, a Los Angeles-based company that makes
so-called holograms: volumetric video that can be viewed in a VR headset or as part
of an AR app.
A lot of the video content 8i makes is focused on celebrities or animals, but not in this
case.
This was really early on in the company and we were looking for ways to test the emotional
connectivity that can happen between a real person and a digital person,
and so a mom and a baby seemed like a really good idea.
When Ashley came back and she was able to enter her hologram and hold her baby again,
she got very emotional, we all got very emotional watching her and we understood, “Hey we’re
onto something.”
After seeing Ashley’s experience, other 8i employees started to
bring their kids in to get their own holograms made.
This is one-year-old Lowell next to almost two-year-old Lowell.
And he was super bald then, but he still carries the same blankie.
We’re going to film you using all these cameras right now.
See all the cameras circling around you?
But you have to stay in this little circle in order for the cameras to see you.
Last month, we followed Ashley as she made her fourth trip to 8i.
This time, with her now youngest child, Wilder.
Being recorded isn't any different than normal video -- which I happen to know,
because I’ve had a hologram of myself made before.
What is different, though, is what it's like to experience it afterwards.
Whoa, this is so cool!
It's so nice to see the little her again.
Looking at a flat image, it's just way different.
She's changed so much, and it's just crazy how fast it's going.
It just takes you right back to that moment, and when you’re dealing
with a newborn it feels like that stage is just going to last forever, because your days are
long and your nights are longer, but it really goes by so fast.
So to be able to jump right back into that again, it was overwhelming.
Anytime you had that feeling of "I miss my newborn. I miss that stage." It’s kind of cool
that you can literally just put on a headset or
with the new technology with the phones and everything, you can
be right back in that place.
AR is definitely more accessible to view now that it’s on smartphones.
But the big question is when will people be able to tape holograms the way that Ashley has.
At least one major company invested in AR and VR has taken steps towards that: Microsoft
just opened its first “mixed reality” capture studios in San Francisco and London.
8i says that’s coming, but they’re just not there yet.
Do you have friends asking you if they can come in to 8i and do this -
Sorry to interrupt you, but everybody
asks me about that. Everybody wants holograms of their kids.
Can you imagine a world in which this becomes commercially available through 8i?
Yes, I think it will be, hopefully in the not too distant future.
We don’t have a firm date for that because there’s a lot of engineering that has to
happen, but I can tell you that we are starting to experiment with how does
the quality get affected if you use less cameras, and that’s with an eye towards a lot of
use cases.
Capturing your kids. What about dating?
How are people going to make dating apps of the future, social VR?
But it's not all baby holograms and dating apps.
In our quest to find others who have been experimenting with AR and VR to capture memories,
we ended up taking a deep dive into one of the darkest
moments in history.
Hi, Pinchas. How are you today?
I'm fine, thank you.
Tell me about your experience during the Holocaust.
This is Pinchas Gutter.
He’s a still-living Holocaust survivor who has had his life story preserved by the USC Shoah
Foundation.
Over the past 23 years, the foundation has been capturing personal testimonies of
people who survived genocide.
And as part of a newer project, called "New Dimensions in Testimony," the foundation has been experimenting
with AR and VR.
How does it feel to be a hologram?
It feels a little strange when I watch myself.
It's so important for the future to actually see and hear, and be able to interact with a Holocaust survivor,
despite the fact that he's just a hologram. It's so important because I think
it will impact the audience in a much more forceful way
than just watching a film in a one- or two-dimensional way.
Even though I know it's not a real person and it's a video, it feels very real.
Part of the reason why talking to Pinchas felt so natural is that the foundation
created its own natural language processing system that enables the
video to respond to you -- actually have a conversation, not preformed robot
responses.
I think that the immediacy of this format brings you really close to the subject.
And I think it’s going to become the standard way in which we document our history.
Because what we’ve seen so far, with New Dimensions in Testimony, is that people
do feel emotionally connected.
They want to know more, and feel, when they’ve come away from it,
that they have had some kind of visceral and emotional experience.
There are obviously still technical hurdles around creating and experiencing personal
memories in these formats.
In a lot of cases, like when it requires a headset, these things just aren’t easy to
pick up and view the way you can look at a flat photo, or a video clip on your TV.
But the bigger question might be what happens once this kind of immersive video is married
with artificial intelligence, which is where some experts say it’s going.
What if a holographic AI isn’t just recognizing what you’re asking, but is formulating its
own responses?
So these were all discussions that we had to have, and they are important because actually
there are going to be versions of this in the future, for sure.
Where you're going to be able to take the human form of a subject and put words into
his or her month and be able to create answers from an artificial intelligence drawn off
a database that’s continually growing and changing.
That’s without question that that’s going to happen.
But that’s going to be an Android, and what we’ve got are human beings telling their story.
And we make a very clear distinction between the two.
A future filled with hyper-realistic “holograms” seems bizarre, but also quite possible when
you consider the advancements being made in AR and VR.
And it makes sense that this technology would impact the way we experience memories -- the
stuff closest to our hearts and minds, basically.
It’s an emotional experience.
Right now, that mostly just means capturing people as we see them now.
But this kind of volumetric capture might also be the next level of how we interact
with people when they’ve dramatically changed - or when they no longer actually exist.