Holograms to replace people at New York airports | Hacker News Reader

Holograms to replace people at New York airports

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20 pointspdelgallego18 comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's firmly in the Uncanny Valley.

I've also seen this in a UK airport. I did not think it was a hologram.

When I read the title, I was expecting something different: A pool of agents "beaming into" the busy hotspots from a central, remote location. E.g. If airport A is quieter than airport B, then the agents just beam into airport B.

The agent can see the person via camera, and can tell the person to place his passport in a reader that quickly scans all pages, and sends the agent an image. To stamp the passport, the agent can tell the person place page X in slot "Y", where the agent can release the stamp remotely.

Then I read about the $180k non-interactive cardboard cutouts....

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.

It is the "AVA" avatar from http://airportone.com

Ah-hah, cheers :)

Thanks for the eye-witness info. The need for the actor/actress to remain frozen in position so as not to extend parts of their body outside the perimeter of the screen explains the wildly exaggerated facial expressions (including Stepford-y smiles so wide that I'm pretty sure that I saw some wisdom teeth) of the actress-playing-avatar in the video embedded in the linked page.

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 *"

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.

I feel uncomfortable watching it and thinking of the $180,000 they wasted.

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.

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.)

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

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.

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