On April 11, 2018, ARHT Media holoported notable historian, Dr. Yuval Noah Harari, from Tel Aviv, Israel to the TED2018: The Age of Amazement conference held in Vancouver, Canada. Professor Harari was holoported to TED2018 for his talk in real-time, followed by a live Q&A session with Chris Anderson, the Head of TED, who attended the event in person.
Our holographic telepresence technology uniquely enabled Harari, a busy professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, to participate in a conference that he would have otherwise been unable to attend.
Mina Sabet, TED’s Director of Video and Production, stated that “this technology will bode extremely well for similar circumstances when high profile speakers are unable to physically be present at one or multiple venues.”
Moreover, ARHT Media’ s live stream two-way delivery enabled an interactive Q&A session with holoported Dr. Harari and the Head of TED, Chris Anderson, who attended TED2018 in person.
Sabet added that “we [TED] were thrilled with the live audience reaction to Professor Harari’s address, especially when he and Chris [Anderson] were conversing on stage at the end of his talk.”
In his TED talk, Yuval Noah Harari warned that new technology might be used as a fascist tool. He argues expansion of artificial intelligence and centralized data processing threatens democracy by making dictatorships more efficient than relatively decentralized democracies. In response, Harari suggests preventing large amounts of data from being concentrated by a select few to avoid manipulation by those controlling the data.
