Tom Pascoe, photo by Chris Bethell
From where I’m standing, I can see Tom twice. The broad-shouldered sales manager is standing next to me, beaming as he watches himself—because he’s also opposite me, as a hologram on his phone, wearing a Liverpool jersey and bouncing a soccer ball between his knees. “So embarrassing,” he protests. “I haven’t played soccer in so long.”
We’re in the conference room of a shared workspace in the city, with the company’s founder, Janosch Amstutz, and his newest employee, Tom Pascoe. They are keen to impress; both seem a little sheepish that they don’t have an office of their own yet, adding that they’ve been looking at permanent new locations all week. As they demonstrate the hologram, their eyes dart between the phone screen and my expression, making sure it’s having the desired effect. “A lot of people look at me really strangely until I get the phone out,” Pascoe tells me later, referring to his meetings with prospective clients. “Then it takes them about three minutes to realize what it is they’ve just seen, and then we can have a conversation.”
Augmented reality—or AR—refers to technology that overlays simulated objects onto the users’ view of the real world. So far, the technology has mostly been used for fantasy and animation—the most obvious recent example being Pokémon Go, which placed the game’s characters on every street corner for users to discover with their smartphones. Yet the potential of technology that can edit, improve, and impose on the physical world goes far beyond gaming.
HoloMe—whose office I’m standing in—is a new startup advancing the technology into the realm of communication, by creating holograms of real people.
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Janosch Amstutz. Photo by Chris Bethell
Amstutz founded HoloMe eight months ago. Until that point, he’d been working as a commodities manager with a firm in Switzerland, a job he describes as dry—”moving large rocks around the world.” He had designs on something more interesting, so began personally financing a group of Russian programmers with the intention of creating humans in augmented reality. The project hit walls, and some elements were shelved until eventually the technology began to come into focus.
“We found a way to create human interaction that nobody else is doing,” Amstutz explains. He speaks with a part-Swiss, part-Australian accent, and all the earnestness required of a tech-startup founder.
In simple terms, HoloMe converts a video of a person into a lifelike “hologram” that can be viewed using a smartphone or a tablet. The image, enhanced with effects to make it appear 3D, attaches itself to the floor and occupies the space, moving around but also allowing the person viewing the hologram to move closer or further away. During our conversation, Pascoe demonstrates one of their older examples: A catwalk model who walks up and down the room, modeling a floral dress. The content itself is a bit “woman in red,” but the effect is undeniable. She’s there.
Fiction has, strangely, tied us to an outdated idea of what a hologram should look like. The shaky blue visions of Star Wars are limited compared to what HoloMe has already achieved. Even the most famous hologram to have been produced—Tupac, at Coachella in 2012—was a fuzzy, ghostly thing. The holograms I’m looking at are fully realized people: vivid, detailed, in the room. “It puts them in your space, and you in their space,” Amstutz pitches. “The experience is totally different. You’re there.”
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The idea is that businesses will use HoloMe’s technology to create enhanced communication with users. You’ll be able to watch a model walk around your living room while you shop for jeans. Soccer teams (HoloMe are in conversation with two of them) will be able to beam new signings into their supporters’ living rooms. Record labels can create music videos that pop-up on street corners. The company has been talking with tourist boards and museums, interested in location-triggered holograms that could act as virtual tour guides, waiting for you at landmarks.
Pascoe, who joined the company in November of last year and sells the idea, confidently reckons that anyone who fails to see the potential of the technology is being short-sighted. “The companies who write it off are the same companies that saw Christmas fail for them in terms of revenue,” he adds. “A lot of companies are now reaching out to us because they are realizing they’ve got to make a change to stay relevant.”
It’s certainly true that augmented reality is having a moment. Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and Twitter have all experimented with it, to varying degrees. In December 2016, American startup Magic Leap—a business which raised $1.4 billion from investors including Google to develop AR devices—was valued at $4.5 billion by Forbes. Yet, so far, beyond the dog-ears your little sister adds to every photo she takes of herself, the felt impact has been small.
Amstutz is determined for HoloMe to change this, describing companies like Magic Leap as manufacturers of “hugely futuristic” ideas, but suggesting—perhaps unfairly in Magic Leap’s case —that they have produced very little in the way of actual results. “My mentality—and the team shares this—is that we should be developing tech for what’s possible now,” he tells me. “We’re creating for mobile devices. We’re deploying it to people now.”
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The pair relish listing the possible uses for their technology. They are currently finishing work on an app that will allow you to scroll through pre-made holograms from accounts you follow—celebrities, bands, newspapers—as well as sending holograms of yourself to your friends. You could send a hologram of yourself sipping daiquiris on vacation to your mom, have a protester stand in your kitchen describing the scene of a riot, or host an Elton John concert in your bathroom.
They also foresee plenty of ways that HoloMe can seamlessly blend with the physical world. “If you’re close to a house that’s for sale and you see a HoloMe logo on the for sale board, you can open the app, and a real estate agent can appear and pitch you the house,” Amstutz says, grinning.
The company has also mastered a livestreaming version, meaning holograms could be recorded and beamed out in real time—a breakthrough achieved less than 48 hours before our interview.
The full potential of HoloMe’s work, and the promise of lifelike augmented reality, is both bright and alarming. Politics is one area where the company sees a wealth of opportunity. “The thing politicians have the least of during a campaign is time,” Amstutz explains, excitedly. “They’ll be able to get in the presence of people millions of times—you can multiply a hologram infinitely using a smartphone.” Pascoe adds that HoloMe is in conversation with one British political party already—they won’t say who—as well as another in Central America.
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Source: VICE