Now that the Delta variant has scuttled the world’s reopening plans, social distancing could be around for a long time. But that’s only if you take a corporeal point of view. Last year, as a birthday present for Kim Kardashian, Kanye West commissioned a hologram of her dead father. In April, Sean (Diddy) Combs beamed his holographic self from Miami to Los Angeles for his son’s birthday party. “Man marries hologram he admired for 10 years,” the Evening Standard reported. Will the pandemic free us from our physical shackles?
The other day, David Nussbaum, a hologram entrepreneur, arrived at an office near Chelsea Market to demonstrate a large glowing box that looks like a vending machine and quietly hums. It was the grand opening of the New York headquarters of PORTL, his telepresence company. His big boxes have been popping up around the world lately—at Cannes, where they displayed N.F.T. art; at a Shanghai watch fair, where a Swiss watchmaker took meetings with clients at twice his normal size.
Nussbaum wore black glasses, a blazer, and Converse sneakers, as he had a few days earlier for a panel at Christie’s. Unlike Princess Leia’s message for Obi-Wan Kenobi, PORTL’s holograms aren’t technically three-dimensional, but they do look startlingly realistic, staring out of a six-and-a-half-foot-tall touch screen within an aluminum frame. (“You’re right, it’s not really a hologram, Mr. Wizard,” Nussbaum tells nitpickers. “It’s a digital likeness.”)
Half of the participants on the Christie’s panel were there not in person but as luminescent digital likenesses. Nussbaum had flown from Los Angeles, where he lives with his children and his wife, Charla, who was eight and a half months pregnant. “It took seven hours to get from L.A. to New York, turbulence the entire time,” he said. “Why am I not just beaming there?”
PORTL sells its big machine and associated high-tech software and services for as much as a hundred thousand dollars. There are plans for a desktop version that would cost closer to two or three thousand. Customers include medical schools, such as the one at the University of Central Florida, where students will examine holograms to identify symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, and to practice their bedside manners. Other buyers: rap moguls. The machines have microphones and cameras embedded in them, like giant smartphones, so, when Combs attended his son’s birthday party, he could interact with the guests. An attempt to sing “Happy Birthday” along with the crowd was thwarted by a slight delay, a kink Nussbaum is working out.
Nussbaum used to host an interview podcast (Henry Winkler, Jenny Slate) in his living room. But after a computer-generated Tupac walked the stage at Coachella, in 2012, he switched careers. He found himself running an early hologram company that resurrected Billie Holiday, Jackie Wilson, and Whitney Houston. Soon he started projecting the living, as well. In 2014, he beamed Julian Assange through a satellite truck parked outside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to Nantucket for a TED talk-style event. Holo-Assange took questions from the audience.
Those early projections required total darkness, which is a tough sell. Nussbaum worked on new machines in his living room and, in 2019, he founded PORTL. When the pandemic hit, the company took off. “I should have started it a year earlier,” he said. “Maybe I’d be Zoom right now.”
He walked over to a machine and started it up using an app on a tablet. A shoulder, and then a backside (belonging to a PORTL employee in L.A.) appeared in 4K volumetric resolution. “It’s like hologram FaceTime,” Nussbaum said. The employee stepped away and Charla, Nussbaum’s wife, materialized in a leopard-print dress, beside their daughters, in pigtails. Charla waved.
“High five?” Nussbaum asked her.
Charla hesitantly raised her hand. “I don’t like this bit,” she said.
“A kiss?”
“I’d rather give you one in real life,” she said. The girls offered sheepish thumbs up. Nussbaum stroked the illusion of one daughter’s hair. “This is like the time I dressed up as Santa Claus and they didn’t know it was me,” he said. He ran his hand around his wife’s swollen belly. “And this little guy in here, I can’t say his name or I’ll get in trouble.”
The family had never communicated by PORTL before, but Charla was unfazed. “I’m happy that he’s in New York doing it now, instead of in the living room,” she said. They signed off to go swimming. Nussbaum launched a montage of recorded holograms from the tablet and said he plans to add a chatbot feature. “I have a hologram of me,” he explained, as Spider-Man appeared on the screen. “My children’s great-grandchildren will be able to sit opposite my hologram and ask any question, like hologram Alexa,” he said. Spider-Man pressed his hands against an imaginary screen, like a mime trying to escape. ♦
