SANTA MONICA, Calif. — Throughout his decades-long career as the frontman of the legendary band Steppenwolf, John Kay has done countless interviews worldwide.
“It can become quite tedious in the sense that you hear yourself droning on and on about the same sort of thing,” Kay said.
The last thing the man known for the song Born to Be Wild wants to be is boring. But on a particular morning in early March, as he waited in the greenroom of the Santa Monica studios of Digital Nation Entertainment, he knew that would not be a problem — at least not this time.
“When you get into this new territory, it keeps you from becoming the guy in a rocking chair on your porch, right?” he said.
This interview was unlike any of the hundreds, if not thousands, that he had done before. But it wasn’t so much what he was about to say that was so unusual but how.
As he sat in front of a futuristic-looking screen, his interviewer, Canadian journalist Gord Martineau, beamed up as a 3D hologram.
“The joys of the magic of a hologram, with us now, John Kay, we’re so happy to have you with us today, John. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this,” Martineau said as he kicked off the interview.
Even before he could finish, Kay let out a, “Wow!” “It looked like Scotty from Star Trek just put you in front of me,” he added.
Martineau, who’s working on a documentary about the music scene in Toronto’s Yorkville neighborhood in the 1960s, had hoped to interview Kay in person, but COVID-19 threw a monkey wrench into his plan. So Martineau found the next best thing, beaming himself 2,500 miles from Canada to California as a hologram.
“It’s not just a shot on a monitor like a head-and-shoulder-shot, it’s a full-bodied hologram, and the clarity is such that you could swear the person is standing right there,” he said.
Once the stuff of science-fiction, holograms are now becoming a reality as companies race to meet the exploding demand for connectivity in a post-pandemic world.
Kay’s interview was done in front of a HoloPod, a 3D display system by Canadian company ARHT Media. The image is created in front of a regular green screen and then projected onto a highly reflective mesh. A dark background and colored lights give the appearance of a 3D image in real-time.
“I’m being captured in 4K,” said ARHT CEO Larry O’Reilly, who beamed himself from Toronto for the interview with Spectrum News 1. “My audio is being captured with a little microphone here. I have an earpiece so I can hear you as well, and we take that data, and we put it into our ARHT engine server, and really that’s what our business is all about. The software that enables these large data packs to travel over the common internet fully secure, fully encrypted with almost no noticeable latency.”
The technology isn’t cheap. An event using the HoloPod can cost upwards of $20,000. But O’Reilly said it’s only a matter of time before it’s available to the masses.
“I envision your big widescreen TV turning on its side, and all of a sudden, your friend beams in from the other side of the world, or maybe the other side of the city,” he said.
For Kay, it was a mind-blowing experience, one he won’t soon forget.
“That was really quite something,” he said. “I was struck by how It was really like I could just reach out and touched him. I have to say the realism of it was a whole lot more real than my expectations for it.”