Onboard the International Space Station (ISS), astronaut Thomas Pesquet interacted with NASA's flight surgeon Dr. Josef Schmidt in October last year. What was different about this interaction was that Schmidt's hologram was projected on the ISS, while he was comfortably sitting on Earth, NASA said in a press release earlier this month.
NASA termed this technique holoportation - an amalgamation of the words hologram and teleportation that take us a step further than the 2D (two-dimensional) interactions that we are quite used to by now. In this technique, high-quality three-dimensional (3D) images are captured, compressed, and transmitted in real-time and then displayed over a mixed reality display.
To achieve this feat, NASA collaborated with AEXA Aerospace, a Houston-based company that provides custom software for mixed and virtual reality applications. Using Microsoft's HoloLens, a mixed reality display device, a HoloLens Kinect camera, and AEXA custom software, NASA could bring about an interaction between the two parties where they could see, hear and interact in 3D, as though they were sitting on the same room.
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