A sweet find from the ‘Holocaust’ Google Alert.

‘Stories of Holocaust survivors retold by holograms,’ by Deseret News.

hologram

Straight from The University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts:

For the past 18 months, a group led by USC’s Shoah Foundation has been […] creating three-dimensional holograms of nearly a dozen people who survived Nazi Germany’s systematic extermination of 6 million Jews during World War II.

USC hopes to export its survivor holograms to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in D.C, within the next five years.

The coolest part of this: the holograms will be more than pre-recorded talking points. They will be interactive, and capable of answering real-time questions.

[Holocaust survivor Pinchus] Gutter had to sit under an array of hot stage lights and in front of a green screen for hours at a time over the course of five days, answering some 500 questions about himself and his experiences.

Research scientists at USC are still editing them and working with voice-recognition software so that his hologram will not only be able to tell his story but recognize questions and answer them succinctly. Being able to do that often required asking as many as 50 follow-up questions to one of the original ones, Smith said.

While researchers have found there is generally a range of about 100 questions people ask survivors of the Holocaust, if someone in the future comes up with one Gutter’s hologram can’t answer, it will simply say so and refer them to someone who might know.

Of course, this technology has been put to use elsewhere:

More than 15 years after his death, rapper Tupac Shakur made a 3-D hologram-like appearance at last year’s Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, performing alongside a real Snoop Dogg.