Skip to main content

Man builds a homemade hologram generator to bring Microsoft’s Cortana to life

Holographic Cortana Appliance
Microsoft announced this week that its Cortana artificial intelligence assistant has more than 145 million users, representing about a third of the 500 million users that have upgraded to Windows 10. Likely only one of those 145 million users has a Cortana digital helper like Jarem Archer’s, though.

That is because the Florida-based developer has created a holographic Cortana avatar to go along with its regular disembodied voice. His idea was to build a physical piece of kit that shows what a future Cortana-based home appliance would look like, using the holographic AI sidekick from the Halo video game franchise.

“I say ‘holographic’ as it’s a friendlier term, but the effect produced is essentially what’s called ‘Pepper’s ghost,’” Archer told Digital Trends. “[That means] specialized mirror glass that reflects a display at an angle which produces a translucent image. This is also how many teleprompters work. I went with a pyramid design which allows viewers to see the Cortana assistant on either side, in addition to the front.”

Archer’s wife stood in as the motion-capture model for Cortana, which Archer recorded with a pair of Microsoft Kinect motion sensors, before applying the data to his Cortana model in graphics engine Unity.

“The unit is powered with a Windows 10 machine that runs software to tunnel the OS’s native Cortana communications to the device,” he explained. “What the viewer sees is rendered from a Unity 3D application I built. Unity’s software is typically used to create games but has many other practical applications. Also included in the design is a 3D-printed frame I modeled, an omnidirectional microphone, and a speaker which sits in Cortana’s pedestal.”

The results make for a pretty darn fun home hack, which Archer plans to continue working on — although he is not yet clear what the end product will be.

“The project is still pretty much a work in progress,” he said. “I do intend to clean up and implement more animations to add variation to the interactions. While I’m not entirely sure on this specific project’s commercial ability, I intend on producing a very interesting product in the near future.”

Editors' Recommendations

Luke Dormehl
I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more