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In an Australian first, and in a scene reminiscent of a Star Wars Jedi Council meeting, Australia’s dominant carrier Telstra has projected a life-size 3-D hologram of its chief technology officer, Dr Hugh Bradlow from Melbourne live to a stage in Adelaide, which is more than 700 kms away. Dr Bradlow’s life-sized, real-time hologram walked, talked and interacted with business executives at an Adelaide conference while he stood in front of cameras in Telstra’s Melbourne office. Cameras and microphones in Adelaide allowed Dr Bradlow to see and hear his subjects in the Adelaide audience, as they watched his high definition image projected onto a transparent screen or “foil”. Click here to see the video on ABC News.

The technology, created by British company Musion Eyeliner, has already enabled former US vice president Al Gore to speak to the Live Earth concert’s London audience from Tokyo, and retailer Target to host a model-less virtual fashion show in New York last year. UK band Gorillaz has also used Musion to give life to three-dimensional cartoon characters who performed their song at a 2005 MTV Awards concert in Portugal as rappers interacted with them live on stage.

But Telstra reckons it’s not just for entertainment, but believes there are real business applications and serious benefits from this technology. Perhaps it will help to reduce carbon emissions as executives take less flights, opting instead for their 3-Image to travel? Certainly, that would be a more productive use of one’s time, and reduce travel costs. But clearly it is early days and the costs of this technology as still quite high. This particular holographic video projection system took about half a day to set up, and to move the image the infrastructure needed was “tens of megabytes”, which Telstra ran across its high-speed internet-based Next IP network, which was launched in April last year.

So, a sign of things to come, or pure science fiction?