Okay. I am a fairly staid individual. You won’t hear me squeal or giggle like other fan girls. I end up tongue tied instead. But when I read this article heading, I embodied every form of sqeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!
I mean, the first ever holographic teleportation? When do I get to step onto Voyager and meet The Doctor? Who’s our only hope now?! Now, if you read the article (and you should), it’s not as cool as the Star Trek version. For instance, the holo cannot touch objects. But, still SO COOL!
Here’s the overview: NASA, using the joint technologies of the HoloLens from Microsoft and a special holographic camera from Aexa Aerospace, “teleported“ a doctor onto the International Space Station as a holograph.
As the article points out, this will revolutionize our communications. We have learned how awful virtual meetings are thanks to COVID-19. Holoportation returns the missing elements of face-to-face meetings, especially if both parties use the HoloLens and camera. Another space where holoporting will create a paradigm shift is in medicine, especially for rural or remote areas. As the author points out, this tech can offer much needed health expertise to isolated locations where doctors are scarce.
So how is this re-imagined into your science fiction world? Remember, sometimes the most powerful way to future-ize your world is not in giving your characters mechanical wings to fly, but in “upgrading” common place aspects of our present world that we take for granted. For instance, how often do you call customer service or look up You Tube videos? In the future, you could engage an expert, or YouTube How To Guru, to holoport (most likely for a fee) to your location and walk you through your technical difficulties. This could mean that spaceships are not required to hire doctors or mechanics, etc. onto their crew, instead accepting the risk of receiving support only through holoportation.
In the future, I foresee this as a common tool, with rooms, or platforms, or terminals designated to holoport you to other places. Perhaps this provides a cheap version of vacation for those long space voyages when you cannot leave the ship. And if it’s portable (and it’s all fiction, so why not?), then mount it to a drone or rover. This allows a crew to conduct first investigations of new worlds without putting themselves at risk. After all, the era of having the least important crewman taste the berries for poison should be firmly behind us!
So many story ideas can build from the idea of holoportation. Take some time and come up with a few of your own. And watch your email for the next installment of Science Fiction Suppositions!
May Imagination Reign! 🙂