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The processing steps that once required weeks of human iteration now run automatically. What changed, what didn't, and where the human loop still matters.
Published 3 July 2026
Three years ago, converting captured footage into the Holobox playback format was a hands-on process. A content technician applied depth cues, edge treatment, and background isolation frame by frame, iterating until the finished projection read correctly as a hologram.
In 2026, the equivalent processing is procedural, a pipeline that runs the depth-cue application, edge treatment, and isolation steps automatically once the source footage lands. What used to require two weeks of technician time now runs in hours.
Two things aligned. First, the Recording Station capture setup stabilised. Same rig, same lighting, same backdrop, same calibration across every shoot, the pipeline can now make assumptions about the source it's processing.
Second, the depth-cue heuristics, the specific transformations that make a projection read as three-dimensional, became well-characterised through several years of production experience. The steps that were 'creative judgement' in 2022 became 'documented procedure' by 2025 and 'automated pipeline' by 2026.
Not everything. Creative direction, script iteration, and the final quality review still require human involvement, the automation catches the mechanical work but not the taste-level decisions. A hologram of a spokesperson still needs a human deciding whether the take reads correctly for the brand.
For custom AI Hologram deployments, character training and system integration remain human-heavy work. Automating those would require another generation of tooling; we're not there yet.
Fast-path deployments, customers with existing footage, tight creative briefs, or urgent deadlines, now ship in 2-3 weeks. That opens hologram deployment as an option for shorter-horizon campaigns and time-sensitive activations that previously would have been impossible.
That matters for multi location rollouts (like the CIC Hospitality deployment, planned for 30 hotels) where per-site content economics determine whether a rollout scales.
