Holograms are coming to university classrooms

Technology holograms has been breathing new life into dead and living music legends for years, but now there are plans to use the same system to bring guest lecturers into university classrooms, The Guardian reports.

Loughborough University, located approximately 100 miles north of London, UK, will be the first in Europe to trial the technology for educational purposes when it is transferred to sports scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Those associated with the project say students will prefer a 3D image streamed live from overseas over a video call or a 2D image projected on a wall, with holograms being much more attractive and eye-catching. This will also allow presenters to demonstrate complex equipment more clearly than if it were shown during a Zoom call.

After testing, hologram-based activities could be officially included in the university’s curriculum next year.

This was made possible through a partnership with Los Angeles-based Proto, which already offers holograms to companies looking to cut down on business travel, with technology that allows for meetings where everyone is in 3D, whether they’re in the office or not.

Proto founder David Nussbaum told The Guardian that the technology has great potential and that, when combined with artificial intelligence, it could also be used to recreate deceased people with brilliant minds, citing physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking as an example.

“We can connect [la tecnología] to books, lectures, social media, anything he was involved with, any issue, any interaction with him,” Nussbaum said. “AI Stephen Hawking will look like him, talk like him, and interact like he is.”

To make the technology more affordable, Proto is aiming to produce smaller hologram-projecting devices that will cost less than $1,000 each. However, their hologram will be smaller than the actual size.