

Holograms to replace people at New York airports - pdelgallego
http://futuretimeline.wordpress.com/2012/05/28/holograms-to-replace-people-at-new-york-airports/

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lambda
I always get frustrated when people refer to any random pseudo-3D gimmick as a
hologram. A hologram is a specific type of technology which records
interference patterns from which an approximation of the original light field
can be reconstructed, such that you can look at it from different angles and
see the original scene from different angles.

Other forms of pseudo-3D, like these human-shaped rear projections screens or
people spliced into a scene using chroma keying and multiple camera angles (as
CNN's "holographic interview" works), are not holograms.

There are people at MIT who are working on real holographic video, but of
course, the technology has some substantial limitations:
<http://obm.media.mit.edu/>

There's nothing wrong with alternative forms of presenting pseudo-3D imagery
and video. But I wish people didn't call it all "holograms", because that
leads to confusion rather than clarifying what's going on.

~~~
jaylevitt
The confusion probably stems from the fact that the product manufacturer,
Musion, repeatedly claims that they build "3D Holographic Projections", even
though they're obviously neither 3D nor holographic:

<http://www.musion.co.uk/>

This is the same company that did the Tupac "hologram". It's all based on
Pepper's Ghost, a 19th-century illusion involving a projector with a screen
that reflects the projection, but looks transparent in front of the actors.

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mootothemax
I saw a couple of these a while ago at London Luton airport. Personally, I
found the experience profoundly dehumanizing, and thought it rather depressing
to be talked to by a life-sized, talking, cardboard cut-out.

It's a neat idea for sure, but my preference is for, well, anything that
doesn't look so human and yet so fake at the same time.

~~~
mmcnickle
I've seen these in a few airports now in the UK. They seem to be replacing the
"What to do at the security area" videos. I think it's a step in the wrong
direction. You lose the ability to display diagrams/symbols and understand the
information from a distance or in a noisy environment (exactly like a security
area at an airport). Even worse, you lose the language-agnostic benefits from
a well produced demonstration video.

Their introduction is fueled by the fact that it's "obvious" that people would
want to deal with human avatars, and will of course understand information
better from them. Though it is in fact a poor form of dissemination for most
types of information.

~~~
vannevar
Yes, it seems like five 80" LCD panels running an animated loop would be much
cheaper ($30K vs $180K), convey more information to more people, and be
significantly less creepy.

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camtarn
My local hospital has one of these in the lobby. It's scary quite how
realistically 'hologram-like' it looks from a distance: from the corner of my
eye, I took it for a real person at first, and only realized that it didn't
look quite fully 3D when I looked directly at it.

Once you get closer up you see that it's a rear projector with a rigid free-
standing screen precisely cut to the outline of the avatar, but even from that
close it still looks surprisingly good. Kudos to whichever company makes these
(unfortunately the article doesn't mention which, and I didn't notice any
branding on the one I saw). It'll be interesting to see these if they get them
to be minimally interactive, to the point where you could ask them "Where is
the check-in desk?" and have them reply with pre-recorded directions.

~~~
sbmassey
It is the "AVA" avatar from <http://airportone.com>

~~~
camtarn
Ah-hah, cheers :)

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jacobr
I felt uncomfortable watching the video, mostly due to the way they played the
sex fantasy card.

"I can be used for just about anything, I can sing what you want, dress the
way you want, and be.. just about anything you want me to be * blink *"

~~~
astrodust
Humans aren't capable of maintaining that obnoxiously fake American-style
smile for extended periods of time, either.

I can't wait for these things to be shuttled into the dustbin of history.

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mcmire
For some reason I thought this blog was one of those futuristic fictional news
sites, but I just realized it's more like future news today, and this is real.
Yikes. That's pretty depressing that the company (or whoever actually made
this) decided to make this garbage. Not that I expect holograms-as-people to
get good enough to be accepted by ordinary people in my lifetime (since it's
not just about making a realistic projection, there's the whole AI problem
too. Also the fact that it is weird). But for technophobes, this kind of stuff
just reinforces the idea that technology is cold and robotic and can't mesh
with what we do as humans, which is frustrating for companies who are trying
to reverse that thinking.

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goatforce5
My local supermarket has just got one of these. They've experimented with the
location, and now that it's in a corner with the projector hidden behind a
curtain with a circle cut out for the lens, it's not as obviously rubbish and
the effect almost works if you look out of the corner of your eye.

But it is still just a projector putting a flat image on a piece of smokey
perspex.

(My supermarket doesn't have the audio turned up loud enough, so I have no
idea what it's trying to sell me.)

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zacharyvoase
"I don't need a background check" — no, but your manufacturer and source code
definitely do.

~~~
klausa
Why? It's not interactive, it's basically projector with cardboard cut-out
playing looped video - I don't see why that would necessitate background check
(that said, whole idea of background check is kind of foreign concept to me,
since I don't live in US.

