I wanted to check out one company in particular while attending Amazon Web Services’ re:Invent conference. It came to my attention days prior while perusing LinkedIn, and I became curious about its technology. However, I ignored where exactly I could find it at the show. It turns out that the company, Proto Hologram, wasn’t hard to find.
Advantageously positioned near the front of the expo hall along a major thoroughfare, this startup was surrounded by passerby attendees curious to know how it all worked—and for the opportunity to turn themselves into a “hologram.” But, as I approached the booth, I was struck with a sense I had seen it before. Then it hit me: it felt similar to Neon, Samsung’s humanoid AI chatbot project, unveiled four years ago at the Consumer Electronics Show.
“Completely different technology,” Edward Ginis, Proto Hologram’s Chief Technology Officer, argues. He claims his company relies on a real human form factor rather than the synthetic or animated versions, “which has quite a while to go to break the uncanny valley, which is what Samsung and others have long failed to bring.”
Ginis concedes that Proto Hologram’s and Samsung’s efforts both look to attack the problem with “the same level of conversational relevance,” but that’s the only thing they have in common.
Building a Holographic Communication Platform
Founded by David Nussbaum and Doug Barry, Proto Hologram wants to become the “first holographic communications platform.” It creates holobox hardware and software to make hologram broadcasting and communication a reality. Instead of having a physical human always present at the broadcast’s source, Proto Hologram can capture the image and then make it into a dynamic AI agent.
“What we believe is that AI agents will—just like people—be able to spontaneously iterate and ideate amongst themselves, particularly when different agents are going to have their own contacts, datasets, their own kind of understandings of the world around them through different modalities, vision, speech, [and] language,” Raphael Kryszek, Proto Hologram’s Chief Product Officer, explains.
Those queued up to try out the company’s demonstration inputted their name, vocation, and conversational style. Then, after being scanned, an AI avatar appeared in a seven-foot-tall holobox, bookended by digital representations of Amazon executives Nandini Ramani and Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian. Crowds watched as the three agents interacted with each other autonomously.
“It’s really an incredible modality to experience AI as a holographic presence,” Kryszek claims. “Lots of people interact with the chat interface. People now are doing voice, but there are applications we find that are sticky and frictionless where you just want a sense of presence interacting with a person. That’s what we got here.”
Proto Hologram is model agnostic, meaning customers can use any LLM they want while fine-tuning it with their own datasets. The company doesn’t do any data storage, saying that its platform adheres to the customer’s enterprise security policies, which can include avoiding asking for personally identifiable information. And if the AI avatar encounters a question or problem it can’t solve, Kryszek tells me that the system will follow the customer’s established guardrails, reducing the odds of it hallucinating—”Sorry, I’m not here to talk about politics, but I’d love to sell you a Big Mac.”
Although much of the attention was on the seven-foot-tall display, the company has at least one smaller form factor: a 21.5-inch tabletop version. And they’re not cheap installs either—the large device will cost around $30,000 while the smaller one is priced around $7,000.
Solving a Scarcity Problem
Retail, healthcare, and education are the predominant use cases for Proto Hologram’s tech. Merchants are said to be using it to provide in-store product support—customers can approach the avatar and ask it questions about how to set up a new phone or device or anything else about what’s in the store. In addition, healthcare organizations are using the devices to offer added patient support—”now, grandma can go in and have a natural, frictionless conversation with a person to tell you all about after-patient care,” Kryszek says.
“We’re seeing…that patients have found that they have an easier time talking to an AI avatar about things they’re uncomfortable talking about with people as they would with even a doctor. So this has opened up dialogs,” Ginis adds.
The company believes it’s alleviating a scarcity problem by helping customers deal with staffing shortages, especially for customers in more remote locations. Customer service shouldn’t be limited to those who live near a physical location or in dense parts of the world. Ginis explains that a customer could be at Best Buy seeking help for a product or device. If a Geek Squad representative isn’t available, the customer could turn to the AI avatar. The chatbot would interact and answer questions up to the point when it needed to turn support over to a human expert based elsewhere, such as New York or Los Angeles.
“This is where you have the crossover, much like you have on phone lines now, where you start with an automated experience, and then a human steps in. This combines both together.” Ginis remarks. “Not only are the avatars experts on the products themselves, but they also [are] equipped with all of the materials behind those products, so they’re able to go deep…with anyone conversing.”
Proto Hologram reveals it has over 120 customers using its products, with holobox technology being used at the Super Bowl and by companies H&M, Christie’s, T-Mobile, DHL, PWC, Netflix, the University of Central Florida’s College of Medicine, the O2 Arena, CBS, AT&T, Medtronic, and others.
Building Presence Where You Couldn’t Be Present
Companies would love to be everywhere their customers are, but the reality is that there’s never enough staff or money to invest in this space. Proto Hologram believes it has a viable AI-powered solution. Will organizations pay $30,000 for a monstrous display inside their stores or offices? Or would they prefer to leverage existing devices and have the holobox technology reside on edge devices? Either way, Proto Hologram appears OK with it.
It’s feasible for more businesses to one day incorporate Proto Hologram’s operating system natively into its app to provide direct customer support visually. Kryszek acknowledges that his company is making it happen today: Verizon and HP are implementing it within their offerings. Walmart is leveraging it as part of its omnichannel bridge that connects the online retail help center and the physical retail location via a QR code. “Buy it on your phone, or the phone will navigate you to the spot in the store that has the item.”
The company feels it has few competitors. When asked, Kryszek only referenced Google’s Project Starline. However, he emphasized that it’s a “very narrow use case. It’s a single-player experience…For the moment, there’s nobody else doing it the way we do. We took a lot of effort. We had to build an operating system from the ground up, bespoke to wearable, free spatial compute.”
Proto Hologram is based in Los Angeles, California, and has raised around $15 million in funding today. The company plans to start its Series B fundraising round soon.
Featured Image: Proto Hologram showcasing its hologram boxes at AWS' 2024 re:Invent conference. Photo credit: Ken Yeung
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