There’s been a little buzz in the blogging world this week about Musion, who call themselves “the world leader in 3D holographic projection.” This was triggered by Guy Kawasaki linking to a video showing Cisco CEO John Chambers chatting on stage with a couple of his staffers across an ocean. I’ve seen suggestions that this technology will make air travel obsolete, or substitute at some point for the sort of web conferencing that web workers are familiar with.
The demo is fairly impressive, combining Cisco’s telepresence work with Musion’s projection system. And yet…I don’t think people are really understanding what’s going on here, or where it will go in the future. As far as I can tell, this is not the sort of thing that will replace videoconferencing, even at the high end.
Let’s get my first minor complaint out of the way first: this is not a hologram, but an application of Pepper’s Ghost, an optical illusion that you may be familiar with from watching the ghosts in Disney’s Haunted Mansion rides. While Musion’s work in commercializing this technology with a nearly invisible and seamless projection screen are impressive, they don’t make the resulting images holograms; the three-dimensional appearance they have comes from the mind assuming that this realistic picture must be something real. They’re certainly not imbued with the sort of depth that actual holograms display. (Musion doesn’t hide the fact that this is their technology, though their calling it “holographic” is somewhat misleading).
Understanding that piece of technology, and looking at Musion’s list of projects, makes it clear where this is useful technology: when the images are up on stage or otherwise removed from an audience sitting and watching them. This is great for the use case that Guy Kawasaki mentions - giving a speech virtually instead of flying there - but doesn’t really work for 1-on-1 or small group interaction. Chambers was able to interact with the images who were “on stage” with him, but to him, they appeared distorted, so that the audience would see them correctly.
High-end telepresence systems might make effective use of this technology to replace high-definition monitors, and so eliminate some obvious join lines between images. But that’s a far cry from something that is reasonably brought to the desktop. So, while the Musion system is interesting and has its place, that place is not about to be on your desktop, yearnings of bloggers for R2D2-style holograms to the contrary.
Pepper’s Ghost image from Wikipedia user Wapcaplet.
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