Technology/Science
When Your Boss Becomes a Hologram By K Oanh Ha
AS CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER of Columbia Shipmanagement Ltd., Mark O’Neil typically makes dozens of trips a year to far-flung locales for meet-and-greets with the 17,000 crew members of the 400 vessels his company operates. In January he showed up in 3D, 6-foot splendor at a conference in Manila—but traveled just a few miles from the company’s Cyprus headquarters. O’Neil participated in the event as a life-size hologram inside a 7-foot-tall box, and he was able to interact with the audience via a screen in Cyprus. Columbia plans to use the technology to train workers without having to fly people around the world, and O’Neil likes the idea so much that he’s planning to purchase more units for other offices. “It was a real ‘beam me up’ moment,” he says. “They felt I was really there.” At least a half-dozen startups as well as giants such as Google and Microsoft Corp. are seeking to provide holographic communications services to businesses, and companies such as DHL, Novartis, and luxury watchmaker IWC Schaffhausen have signed on as clients. Driven by the pandemic to rethink the rules of work, corporations see holograms as an innovative way to communicate with employees and customers while cutting down on travel. Columbia’s system was provided by Portl Inc., a Los Angeles company that sells the high-tech box O’Neil used in Manila and the Cyprus studio with a camera, light, microphone, and backdrop. The whole setup cost Columbia $160,000, though Portl sells individual boxes for $65,000, and it also offers a $5,000 tabletop version that projects a shrunken version of the subject. Portl has raised $15 million from investors including Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper, and it says it expects to sell 500 booths and 5,000 tabletop units this year. In 92
March-April 2022
Portl’s $65,000 holographic box.Source: Portl
IWC Schaffhausen CEO Christoph Grainger-Herr attends the 2021 Watches & Wonders Fair in Shanghai via hologram.Sour Portl
March the company plans to release an app that will allow users to substitute a cellphone for the studio gear. Holography was invented by Hungarian-British physicist Dennis Gabor in 1951, and two decades later he won the Nobel Prize in physics for the idea. DAWN
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