A university uses holograms of professors to teach certain courses and the students are delighted. So much so that they ask for more. This technology also has other possible applications.
The sector ofHigher Education did not escape the revolution that was generated, not to say forced, by Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. With confinement, we had to adapt to find new learning methods and the use ofvideo conferencing tools gradually became democratized. It can also be used in person. For involve a teacher from another country without the need to move, for example. The problem is that students “feel like they’re watching TV. There is a distance,” summarizes Professor Vikki Locke of Loughborough University in England.
The establishment is now the first in Europe to call on a holographic technology. The same one that allows the group Kiss to continue touring despite its retirement. In a human-sized cabin is projected the 3-dimensional image of a teacher, or even of two people at the same time. The experiment will last throughout 2024, beforeintegrate hologram teachers into the curriculum in 2025. The reaction of the students is unanimous: they “love” and much prefer “a guest speaker […] projected into a classroom rather than a 2D person on the wall,” explains Vikki Locke.
Students at this university love taking classes taught by holograms
For David Nussbaum, founder of the company Proto which supplies the holographic booths to Loughborough University, the possibilities go further. “Proto has the technology to project an image of Stephen Hawking, or anyone, and make it look like he’s really there. We can connect him to books, conferences, social networks, whatever he was attached to […].. A Stephen Hawking AI would look like him, talk like him and interact as if it were him”.
Read also – Mesh: Microsoft wants to democratize virtual meetings with holograms
We can imagine that the amphitheaters would be packed if Albert Einstein came to talk about Relativityor if Coco Chanel was speaking at a conference on design. An attractive idea on paper which is not without raising both ethical and especially legal questions. David Nussbaum of Proto, as enthusiastic as he is, is well aware of this last point.
Source: The Guardian