High on Holograms: When the virtual gets real and the real gets cutting-edge

It takes a certain kind of personality to exude the energy that David Nussbaum does, an energy that comes from creative passion and conviction.  Indeed, even a virtual interaction spanning diverse time zones does nothing to dilute the palpable energy that David represents as he sits talking from his LA based studio, sipping his caffeine fix.  

David Nussbaum is the Founder and Executive Chairman of Proto Hologram, which by its own statement of mission, “brings AI to life in physical spaces”.  Proto Hologram is a global creator/ developer and leading provider of the holobox hardware and software that makes hologram broadcast and communication a reality. Proto Hologram, based out of LA, California, works in the areas of advertising, retail, events, healthcare, education, entertainment and more.     

David is considered a pioneer, who is widely regarded as the leading voice in hologram communication and credited with popularizing the medium globally. 

Rooted in futuristic vision  

Ask David about the start of his journey and how he came up with Proto Hologram and David is quick to answer, “My vision, when I began my journey, was to make communication more engaging, more interactive, more real. For example, instead of talking through a microphone and hearing the voice come through a speaker, or instead of looking into a screen and seeing a face come through on the other side, I thought, what if I could broadcast the other person? What if I can make it physically look like the person is actually in the room with me? And then there was no turning back,” he says, describing his first visualisation of the hologram technology.   

Proto Hologram was in the news recently for enabling an AI Avatar of  Sadhguru interact with attendees of the Mahashivratri festival at the Isha Yoga Centre (in Coimbatore, India) – one of the globe’s largest multi-cultural events and spiritual festivals, attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors in person from over 100 countries, and approximately 140 million via global streaming. Attendees were able to have their own one-on-one conversations with an AI Avatar of  Sadhguru by visiting the Proto Hologram units at the event. They were also able to have a selfie taken with the Sadhguru’s AI avatar and download the photos via Proto’s innovative selfie feature.  

As David explains, “I wanted to give people one to one access to inspirational speakers and leaders and give them the experience of a live interaction, that’s why I started this company. And I’ve been very fortunate that a lot of my dreams have come true here.” 

Hologram for immersive consumer experiences 

Making all of this happen is hologram technology. To put simply, a hologram is a 3-dimensional image that is created from light waves. It doesn’t take a stretch of imagination to see how Holograms can be an effective part of brand marketing and consumer experience.         

As David says, “Being able to sell is also about communication – it’s the brand communicating with the customer, so holograms can be used to not just beam people but brands and calls to action too. Now, when it comes advertising and brand communication, it’s all about creating those wow moments and stand out experiences that make people to pull their car over, take their phones out and record them on their camera and that’s what we’re enabling at Proto.” 

Proto Hologram, as David says, has a pretty sophisticated AI backbone with a closed language model, which means it’s a secure proprietary AI model developed by the company and supported by a big team of data and prompt engineers. As he explains, “There are guardrails in place to make sure you couldn’t ask an avatar a question that the real life person wouldn’t answer.” 

He adds, “We also have lots of customers and partners who are building their own AI applications with their own internal data engineers. So we give them the platform, the hardware and the software platform to help them create their own AI avatars.”  

Proto Hologram has partnered with The Hologram Media Network to distribute the holographic projections to hundreds of malls, airports and movie theatres. Speaking about it, David says, “These projections are so engaging, it’s like live social selling. I’ve seen people congregating around these projections, taking selfies etc.”  

While North America is the biggest market for the company, Europe and parts of Middle East also promise lot of growth, as David shares. Speaking about India, David says, “India is exploding with popularity for us. We’ve worked with some big brands here, so yes India is big for us.” 

Why Holograms? 

So, what does it really take for a brand to invest in something like Holograms for their in-store or OOH campaigns?  

For David, the answer comes easily, “It’s just like buying time on a radio station or a TV station or a digital display. Go to any city in the world and there’s digital billboards, and then you go into any mall and you could buy advertising on any of those flat screens. It’s the same thing. It’s sold the exact same way, and it’s priced similarly. So all things being equal, you can pay some more for a spot on a flat screen in a mall, or in multiple locations, or buy a hologram spot, and make people stop in their tracks and smile. The embedded third-party software applications enable data collection, which gives us leads on demographics and dwell times and this has shown us how people react to the holograms.”  

He adds, talking about the challenge of making brands adopt new technologies, “When you’re trying out a new technology, it sometimes takes a bit of a leap of faith. But we have been able to build a large enough platform with different options for brands/client to buy locally, nationally or even internationally. More importantly, they are realizing that with this technology, people are experiencing the brand, not just seeing it.” 

David sums up, “Hologram advertising is the next multi-billion dollar business.”  

Read the full interview in the March edition of Outdoor Asia magazine.