“I’m a Doctor, Not a Hologram!”

Humans have been going to space for a little over sixty years, and each decade has brought innovations that were previously the stuff of science fiction. Now, a doctor has been aboard the International Space Station (ISS), and without using a rocket to leave Earth.

Doctor Josef Schmid, a flight surgeon from NASA, saw himself “holoported” to the ISS on 8 October last year.

The experiment enabled Dr Schmid – along with Fernando De La Pena Llaca, the CEO of AEXA Aerospace – to enter into orbit using Microsoft’s Hololens Kinect camera and custom software from Llaca’s company.

The image-capturing tools reconstructs, compresses and transmits live 3D models of people – so realistic, it was almost as if they were there on the ISS.

“This is [a] completely new manner of human communication across vast distances,” the good doctor said in a statement released at the start of April.

To put things in perspective, he mentioned that “It doesn’t matter that the space station is travelling 17,500 miles per hour and in constant motion in orbit 250 miles above Earth. The astronaut can come back three minutes or three weeks later, and with the system running, we will be there in that spot, ‘living’ on the space station.”

Although the technology is not new, the latest avenues of research and innovation that are open mean so much more for long-distance communication across space, not to mention the effect holograms will have on the psychological state of galactic travellers.

For example, the first surgery performed in space with a surgeon many light-years away? It’s possible! The future is right around the corner, and soon the emerging tech will allow holograms to boldly go where no one has gone before.

Image Credit: Source