The Hologram Is the Easy Part. The Person Inside It Is the Whole Problem.
By Chris Williams, Founder and CEO, Afterlife.ai™. Published September 5, 2026.
A hologram of a deceased loved one is, today, a display trick that plays back something the person recorded while alive or something a studio built without them. The projection is the easy part and keeps getting easier. What decides whether a family is comforted or harmed is whether the person inside was recorded, consented and locked before death.
On 30 August 2026 the Spanish newspaper EL MUNDO ran an interview with me under a headline that, translated, says that in five to eight years you will be able to talk to the hologram of a deceased relative at the Christmas table. The interviewer was Ricardo F. Colmenero. Within three days the replies to the paper's post had split cleanly: a beautiful way to keep a grandmother's voice, said one half; a horror film at Christmas, said the other.
Both halves were arguing about the projector. Neither was arguing about the person.
Picture the table. A chair has been empty for two Christmases. Somebody has put a box on the sideboard, seven feet of lit glass, and inside it a figure in a cardigan is being asked, by a nine-year-old, whether she still likes the pudding. Everything that matters in that scene was settled years earlier by the woman herself: whether she sat down and answered a thousand questions, whether she said yes to this, whether anyone may add words she never spoke, and what happens when the nine-year-old asks about dying. The box is the least of it.
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Key takeaways
Almost no hologram of a deceased loved one is a hologram: most are flat video on angled glass, foil or a transparent screen.
Every public example so far is either playback of answers the person recorded while alive or a performance built by other people after death.
The USC Shoah Foundation records survivors answering about 1,000 questions, and the system plays back a recorded clip; nothing new is generated.
A Christmas-table version needs a recorded corpus, a locked personality, a consented voice, the person's own footage, a renderer, a display and rules.
The five-to-eight-year headline forecasts adoption, not projectors: display boxes are already on sale, and recordings are the bottleneck.
Afterlife AI never recreates a person who died without their explicit prior consent, and holds video to a higher bar than voice.
Written by Chris Williams, Founder and CEO, Afterlife.ai™. · Last reviewed: 5 September 2026
What is a hologram of a deceased loved one, really?
Almost none of them are holograms. A hologram is a recording of the light reflected by an object, so that the image has real depth and shifts as you walk around it. What gets sold under the word is one of three cheaper things: a flat projection bounced off angled glass or foil, a flat video on a transparent screen inside a lit cabinet, or a digital figure on a very large LED wall lit to hide the edge of the screen.
The oldest of these has a name. Pepper's ghost is a stage illusion in which an image is reflected off a sheet of glass or foil set at an angle, so that a figure appears to stand among the living actors. The Conversation traces the trick to a 1584 book by Giambattista della Porta and to Victorian theatres. When Tupac Shakur walked onto the Coachella stage on 15 April 2012, years after his death, that was the trick: Digital Domain built the figure over six weeks, AV Concepts projected the flat image onto foil, and the projection company's own chief executive said it was not 3D and not holographic.
Volumetric video is the other phrase you will meet. Volumetric video is footage captured by many cameras at once, so that a person can later be shown from more than one angle. The USC Shoah Foundation films its survivors that way, in case a display able to use all those angles arrives later. Until then, by the Foundation's own account, a visitor sees a two-dimensional video clip. When a headline says hologram, read display.
The word hologram describes the hope, not the hardware.
Can you already talk to a hologram of a dead relative?
Yes, in a narrow sense, and every version in public today is one of two things: playback of what the person recorded while alive, or a performance assembled by other people after the death.
What exists | What it really is | Who supplied the words | Did the person consent |
|---|---|---|---|
Dimensions in Testimony (USC Shoah Foundation) | Recorded answers to about 1,000 questions, matched by language search; 2D video, some on Pepper's ghost displays | The survivor, while alive | Yes |
StoryFile Life | Recorded answers to set question lists; software picks the closest one, generates nothing new | The person, while alive | Yes |
ABBA Voyage (London) | Motion-captured performances rendered as digital figures on a 65-million-pixel screen, with a live ten-piece band | ABBA, all four alive | Yes |
Robert Kardashian (Kaleida, 2020) | An actor of similar build, a machine-learned face, a synthesised voice, projected on a gauze | A studio and a family, seventeen years after his death | No, he died in 2003 |
Proto boxes (Luma, M2) | Transparent LCD inside a lit cabinet; now sold with conversational AI | Whoever feeds the box | Depends on the feed |
Dimensions in Testimony is the serious one. In February 2012 the Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter sat inside a light stage surrounded by 50 cameras and 6,000 LED bulbs and answered questions; that was the proof of concept. Each answer is stored as a separate clip. When a visitor speaks, the system converts the question into search terms, finds the closest recorded answer and plays that clip. Nothing is generated. By December 2021 there were 50 interviews in nine languages, with installations in a dozen institutions, including the Sydney Jewish Museum.
ABBA Voyage is the other end of the budget. The four members of ABBA spent five weeks in a motion-capture studio with around 160 cameras, Industrial Light and Magic built the figures, and since 27 May 2022 the show has played to a purpose-built 3,000-seat arena at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park with a live ten-piece band. The figures are widely called "ABBAtars". All four are alive and consented.
On 29 October 2020, for Kim Kardashian's fortieth birthday, Kanye West gave her a hologram of her father, Robert Kardashian, who died of cancer in 2003. Slate reported that the studio, Kaleida, cast an actor of similar build, used machine learning on old footage to fit Robert Kardashian's face and expressions, generated a voice and had sound engineers refine it, and projected the result onto a gauze. Kim Kardashian called the result "so lifelike". Her father had no say in a word of it.
Proto sells the cabinet: a box about seven feet tall with a transparent LCD inside a lit enclosure, and the trade press that watched them run in 2022 said flatly that it is not a hologram. Proto's site now leads with "AI Avatars" and "Conversational AI", so the box is now a screen for a model, not a person.
Every hologram of the dead so far is either playback or performance.
What would a hologram at the Christmas table actually need?
Seven things, and only the last two are about projection. Everything that decides whether the figure is your mother or a stranger doing her voice has to be done while she is alive.
A corpus. A corpus is the body of recorded memories a Persona is built from: stories, opinions, decisions, the way a person explains a thing. I told EL MUNDO that with two thousand memories of a person you can triangulate a good representation of who they are. A museum survivor answers a thousand set questions. A family will ask the thousand nobody wrote down.
A locked personality. Executor Lock™ is the mechanism by which a Persona is frozen as a perfect snapshot at verified death, with nothing added, no retraining and no drift. Without a lock, the figure keeps learning from whoever talks to the box, and by the third Christmas the model has quietly replaced the person.
A voice recorded with consent. The person records their own voice while alive, and the consent covers playback for family after death.
A face from the person's own recordings. Not an actor. Not a face fitted to a stranger's skull by machine learning.
A renderer. The software that turns words into a moving face and a speaking voice.
A display. The box. Proto will sell you one today.
Rules. Who may call, when, and what happens when the nine-year-old asks about dying at eleven at night. Our rule: detect, refer to a helpline with the right number for the country, stop.
Items one to four cannot be bought after the funeral. Once the person has died, every one of them becomes something other people decide, and the result is the Kardashian case with a lower budget.
One more line no display fixes. "I like Spanish football" is a datum. "My favourite player is this man and I think we will win this year" is an inference the model drew from the datum. Both sound like the person. Only one is the person, and a serious system shows its users which is which.
Nobody has ever been kept by a projector.
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Will we talk to holograms of the dead in five to eight years?
The headline was an adoption forecast, not a projector forecast. What I said to Ricardo F. Colmenero was slower: look five years back at how AI adoption moved, extrapolate forward, and acceptance of a product like ours will be many thousands of percent higher; over ten to fifteen years there is no reason a family could not talk with the hologram of a relative who died at their kitchen table at Christmas. A headline compressed fifteen years to eight.
The projector side is already here. Proto ships cabinets. ABBA fills a 3,000-seat arena with figures captured four years ago.
The bottleneck is the corpus, and the corpus has a property no technology curve touches: the person has to be alive to make it. Pinchas Gutter's 2012 interview needed 50 cameras and 6,000 bulbs; today the same recording needs a phone. The cost of recording a person fell to nothing, and the number of people who have done it barely moved, because somebody still has to sit down and answer questions they will not be there to answer later.
So the forecast is about a habit, not a device. When recording yourself for your family is as ordinary as writing a will, the hologram follows within a year. As I put it to EL MUNDO, "AI forces us to rethink what dying means", and the rethinking starts with who does the recording.
The projector will be ready before the recordings are.
Why does Afterlife hold video to a higher bar than voice?
Because a face that is nearly right does more harm than no face, and video fails differently from audio. A wrong word in a voice is a wrong word; the listener corrects it and moves on. A wrong face flickers into a stranger, and the person who loved that face sees the stranger every time.
Kim Kardashian called her father's hologram lifelike. The method was an actor. The better the performance, the more completely a family accepts words the person never said. Praise is not verification.
So our position is narrow. Voice comes first, from the person's own recordings, with consent. Video is held to a higher bar: where video exists, the source is only the person's own recording, with their consent, behind quality gates we set deliberately high. Neither is ever assembled from footage somebody else uploads of a person who has died.
There is a second reason. During development someone uploaded a photograph of a loved one and asked the model to remove her clothes. That is why guardrails sit on every image path.
A face that is nearly right is a stranger wearing someone you loved.
What can a family do now, while the person is alive?
Three things, in this order: record, consent, lock. All three are available today, and the first costs nothing but an afternoon.
Record. The corpus is the whole asset, and the hours have to come from the person. I told EL MUNDO the two I would ask: what would you say at your daughter's wedding, and what would you tell your son at twenty-one. Recording your life story is the plain method, and the free build is 50 memories, no card, and never expires.
Consent. The person, alive, decides that this exists, who may open it and what may be done with their voice and face. That is also a defence: a personality you have legally validated as yours prevents somebody else from creating an unauthorised one later. Voice preservation for your family starts with recording your own voice; creating the voice is free, and listening is the paid experience. Leaving consent for an AI of yourself in your will sets out what a will can and cannot back up.
Lock. Executor Lock™ freezes the Persona as a perfect snapshot at verified death: every memory kept, nothing added to the personality, no retraining, no drift.
And this Christmas, ask the grandmother at the table something. The hologram is a decade away; she is at the end of the table now, and the hologram at the Christmas table is really an argument about her.
Record the person. The projector can wait.
What goes wrong when the hologram is nearly right?
Three things. Grief can be interrupted. A face can be nearly right. And the person in the box may never have agreed to be there.
The first is the objection put to me in the interview: grief needs the acceptance of absence, and a talking figure can make that harder. In some cases that is true, and we do not hide from it. It is why the safety mechanisms went in on day one, and why a concerning conversation ends with a helpline number and a closed session rather than a nudge to continue. No company in this industry should measure grief as time on screen.
The second is the flicker, covered above, and the reason we would rather have no face than a nearly right one.
The third is the one we say no to most often. Every week we receive some version of the same message: my son, my father, my brother has died, I have recordings on my phone, can I upload them. We do not. The one imaginable exception is a person who left explicit written consent, in a will or an equivalent document, that their data may be used to build a personality like this. That is consent, and it almost never exists today. The lines we will not cross sets out each refusal, and trust is our foundation explains how to test whether we mean it.
The hologram at Christmas will come, because displays get solved. The question was never whether we can put a figure in a box. The question is whether there is a person inside the figure, and only a living person can put one there.
The standard cannot be: can we project them.
The standard has to be: did they choose this, and is this still them.
Questions People Ask About Holograms of the Dead
Can you make a hologram of someone who has already died?
Technically yes, and every version that exists is a performance by other people. The Robert Kardashian hologram of 2020 used an actor, a face fitted by machine learning from old footage, and a generated voice; nothing in that performance came from a decision Robert Kardashian made. Afterlife AI does not build a Persona of anyone who died without their explicit prior consent. The only exception we would consider is written consent the person left themselves, for example in a will. Recordings of someone who has died are precious as recordings. They are not permission.
Is the Robert Kardashian hologram real?
The projection was real and the person was not. Kaleida, the studio that made the hologram Kanye West gave Kim Kardashian on 29 October 2020, cast an actor, used machine learning on archival video to map Robert Kardashian's face onto him, synthesised a voice, and projected the result onto a gauze screen. Kim Kardashian described the result as lifelike. Both things can be true: a family can be comforted by a performance, and the performance can still contain no choice the person ever made.
Are the ABBA Voyage ABBAtars holograms?
No. They are digital figures rendered from five weeks of motion capture, with around 160 cameras recording the four members of ABBA, shown on a 65-million-pixel LED screen inside a purpose-built London arena with a live ten-piece band. The lighting hides the edge of the screen, which is why the word hologram sticks. All four members are alive and consented to every performance, which makes ABBA Voyage a model of how this technology should be used, not an example of the dead being recreated.
How does the USC Shoah Foundation hologram work?
A survivor sits in a green-screen rig surrounded by cameras and answers about 1,000 questions, each recorded as a separate clip. When a visitor asks something, natural-language software turns the question into search terms, finds the closest recorded answer and plays that clip. Nothing new is generated, and the Foundation's own FAQ says what you see is a two-dimensional display of video clips rather than a hologram. The first interview, with Pinchas Gutter in 2012, used 50 cameras and 6,000 LED bulbs.
Does Afterlife AI make holograms?
No. Afterlife AI builds a Persona from memories a living person records, in their own voice, with consent that covers playback for the family they name after death, and Executor Lock™ freezes that Persona as a perfect snapshot at verified death. Video is held to a higher bar than voice: where video exists, the source is only the person's own recording, behind quality gates we set high on purpose. A hologram is a display, and a Persona could one day be shown on one. We will never build the person inside the display from footage someone else uploads after a death.
Is talking to a hologram of a dead relative bad for grief?
In some cases it can be. Grief needs the acceptance of absence, and a figure that keeps answering can delay that for some people. That is why our product detects a concerning conversation, refers the person to a helpline with the right number for their country, and stops, and why nothing autoplays. Whether the technology helps or harms depends far more on who built the figure, and how, than on the display. A person who recorded themselves, chose their audience and locked the result is a different thing from a performance commissioned after the fact.
Where To Read Next
The hologram at the Christmas table: the founder essay on the EL MUNDO headline.
The lines we will not cross: every refusal, with the reason and the cost.
Talk to a dead loved one with AI: what people are really asking for.
Executor Lock™: how a Persona is frozen at verified death.
Preserve your voice for your family: your own voice, recorded while alive, with consent.
Afterlife AI in Spain: why a Spanish newspaper asked the questions others skipped.
Questions to ask your family at Christmas dinner: the table is here this year; sixty questions that outlast the meal.
2wai vs Afterlife AI: a three-minute video of the dead against a lifetime of answers from the living.
Uare.ai vs Afterlife AI: the same fear of being forgotten, taken in opposite directions.
An AI version of my parents: the only version of this that works: hand your father the microphone now.
Sources
EL MUNDO, interview with Chris Williams by Ricardo F. Colmenero, PAPEL, 30 August 2026
AV Magazine, Inside the production of ABBA's holographic pop residency, 31 May 2022
NBC News, Kim Kardashian West's late dad appears as hologram, October 2020
Sixteen:Nine (Invidis), Proto's mini hologram-ish display, 25 August 2022
Andscape, The strange legacy of Tupac's hologram after Coachella