MCAAD HOLOGRAM AMBASSADORS
Challenge
Imagine walking into a museum and having conversations with some of the most influential figures in business and philanthropy. The Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream, located in Washington D.C., wanted every visitor to have a personal encounter with their ambassadors: trailblazers like Sara Blakely, Sal Khan, and Sanjay Gupta. This meant building a conversational experience at a level of authenticity and responsiveness that hadn’t been done before.
Strategy
We created four life-sized, interactive, holographic ambassadors that engage in natural conversation, responding in their own words, voice, and mannerisms. The experience, a world’s first, combines live-captured footage with a real-time video game engine and custom AI-driven conversational intuition. Each ambassador speaks to a core pillar of the American Dream. And every interaction feels authentic.
Created with the
goal of real human presence
The best of traditional production combined with emerging AI
Through prototyping, playtesting and collaboration with MCAAD, we narrowed in on a hybrid “AI-light” model that delivers the strongest sense of human connection.
Live footage capture
We traveled across the U.S. to record each ambassador in precisely controlled conditions. Real footage preserves the nuance of how the ambassadors speak, move, and express themselves, something that generative AI can’t replicate.
Custom, real-time graphics
We built a bespoke visual layer in Unity to display each hologram with effects that feel futuristic and alive with subtle materialization, glitch artifacts, and ambient motion—while never overwhelming the human presence at the center of the experience.
AI as conversational glue
A large language model interprets a visitor’s spoken questions and selects a prerecorded response based on the visitor’s conversational arc so far. The result feels like a natural dialogue. It also ensures that AI doesn’t put words into the mouths of our ambassadors that they wouldn’t say themselves.
Multilingual by design
The system seamlessly detects and transitions between six languages without any settings or menus, a feature that helps MCAAD connect with its many international visitors.