Talkin' Live Holograms with Howie Mandel
Can you live without the Real Thing?
When you’re a celebrity, so many people want to interact with you.
What if they could do just that at a retail store, but without the celeb actually having to go there in person?
Friday night at the flagship Skechers store in Manhattan Beach, the comedian Howie Mandel stopped by in-person to demo his new realistic hologram in a giant box, from which he talks to customers, offers them discounts, poses for pictures and speaks in different languages.
“This is a way to interact and engage with a customer globally,” Mandel, who is a Skechers ambassador told me. It’s different from a celebrity talking on a video screen, because “this is interacting and engaging. This is not TV. This is the beginning of something big.”
The name of the technology is called Proto Hologram, for which Mandel is an investor, and founder David Nussbaum sees it as a way to get people back into retail stores.
The kiosk, around 9 feet tall, is super large and the video image looks totally lifelike and realistic, unlike most ghostlike holograms. On screen the celebrity offers discounts and the ability to pose for a hologram selfie. It’s the first for the Skechers store, and company president Michael Greenburg says he hopes to bring it to more of his shops as well.
Holograms have been around for years—there have even been dead celebrities touring and doing concerts, including Roy Orbison and Whitney Houston and live ones like Abba and Kiss, but that trend came and went.
Proto hopes that having the hologram in store, and being able to update the content from the celebrities home, will resonate with the public.
One of the key perks is getting that “selfie” with the machine. A few years back, I had Howie on my old Talking Your Tech series for USA TODAY, and he told me that the term “selfie” didn’t make any sense, since that conotated an individual picture. He said they should really be called “ussies” instead. I brought that up to him Friday night at the Skechers store and you can see his response in the video below.
If you’d like to see my original interview with Howie, I’ve got it archived here.
In other news:
Social Media got a big hit this week, with two big court losses, as juries said Facebook and YouTube were liable for harming the lives of children. So now what? Many said this is the beginning of the end for socials, its Big Tobacco moment.
I don’t see it. I know that Facebook and Instagram are addictive, and the company does everything in its power to keep you glued, with autoplay and algorithms. But doesn’t Netflix do the same thing, by not letting you see credits at the end of the show, and taking you immediately to some other show it thinks you’ll like?
Ditto for YouTube (which also got hit by the L.A. jury.)
I’d love to see the government crack down on Meta, but I’m not seeing any solution beyond having kids under 18 sign in and be limited, with a time clock, to how much they could use the sites every day. Beyond that, parents need to do a better job of not buying phones for kids at young ages, and policing their usage, even though I know that can be a losing battle.
Readers: what do you think should be done?
Thanks AI for jacking up the prices of memory
I told you a few weeks ago about how memory cards, flash drives and solid state drives have gotten excessively expensive, due to the shortage of memory, which has been snapped up by AI companies. Now we have a victim: Sony said it would temporarily suspend the production of memory cards, due to the shortage. World Backup Day is Tuesday, FYI. The Samsung 4 TB SSD drive I bought in 2024 for $250 now sells for $800 on Amazon!
(Solution: we’ve got to go back to spinning disc drives, which are less reliable—but affordable. The 4 TB “Rugged” edition of the LaCie drives is $273 on Amazon. They’re usable—but definitely slower for video editing.
Netflix
The streaming giant jacked up rates again, from $17.99 to $19.99 for an ad-free experience. You know the best way for letting Netflix know how you feel about it? Cancel your subscription. I did. I guarantee you that you’ll find other programs to watch out there in streaming land.
Rufus
This week Amazon launched a “spring sale,” which is little more than Prime Day with fewer discounts. Meanwhile, did you know that you can check the price history on products with Amazon’s Rufus AI chatbot? (That LaCie drive I like is $23 higher than it was a month ago—so no Spring sale discount there!)
One nice thing about Rufus: it can recommend products for you in a way that no retail store clerk can (except perhaps Mark Comon at Paul’s Photo in Torrance, CA) because it has your complete shopping history in its data base. So when I asked, it spit out a bunch of lighting, backup and other photo related products, which sounded cool at the time.
But in reality, it’s just feeding me AI slop—Jeff is a photographer, so he might want to buy a new tripod or soft box. In reality, recent purchases include seltzer water, a razor, flash drive, hard drive and a fast wall charger. So let’s get creative Rufus!
But good idea though. How has your experience been with Rufus? I’d love to hear all about it.
Going to Charleston
Sunday on Photowalks, we’re headed to the beautiful, historic city of Charleston, South Carolina, which is a must-stop for anyone doing an America 250 road trip this year. Why? I’ll tell you about it in tomorrow’s edition. The show debuts at 10 a.m. ET on Scripps (available wherever you get streaming) and will replay on YouTube as well.
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Jeff
Went to Costco for a new computer this week and was told the poor selection was due to a shortage of chips because of AI.