8i branded volumetric video as Holo, not an optical hologram

What you see

8i's product let a VR or AR user look at a moving, photorealistic recording of a real person and walk around them as though sharing the same room, viewed entirely through a headset or phone screen rather than in open air. The company's own 2016 about page describes this as the most immersive 3D video of real people for virtual reality, augmented reality, and the web, calling the experience truly life-like and intimate.

How it works

8i's about page states the company builds on experience in light-field research, visual effects, and consumer platforms drawn from staff backgrounds at Weta Digital, Microsoft Research, NVIDIA, and other studios, applied to turning multi-camera video of a person into a walkable 3D video asset. The company later shipped a consumer app whose own archived page identifies it by the name Holo, with 8i's metadata describing the product as bringing the highest fidelity, most realistic volumetric video recordings of real people into virtual reality; the branding shortens hologram to Holo while the underlying technical description in the same material still says volumetric video, not an optically recorded hologram.

Viewing conditions and limits

Founded in Wellington, New Zealand, in May 2014 and later expanded to Los Angeles and San Francisco, 8i's about page states the company's output is meant for virtual reality headsets, augmented reality, and web playback, meaning it is only visible through a screen or headset display, never as a free-standing image in a room. Neither archived page gives a specific camera count, resulting file size, or processing pipeline detail comparable to the figures Metastage and Microsoft publish for their own capture stages, so the technical depth of 8i's own public description of its 2016-era pipeline is thinner than some of its contemporaries.

What it is not

8i's own materials use hologram and its Holo shorthand as marketing terms for what the company's fuller description calls volumetric video, a multi-camera 3D recording of a real person played back on a screen or in a headset. It is not an interference hologram, not a light-field display of the Looking Glass or Light Field Lab kind, and not visible to anyone not wearing or holding the playback device; the word choice reflects a consumer-facing naming decision rather than a claim about the optical mechanism involved.

• Ask whether an 8i-branded hologram is volumetric video requiring a headset or phone, or a claim about a free-space image.
• Ask what camera setup and processing pipeline actually produced a given piece of 8i content.
• Ask whether the company or product name is still active, since consumer volumetric-capture startups from this period changed hands or shut down frequently.

8i is one of the clearest examples in this guide of a company choosing hologram-adjacent branding, Holo, for a technology its own fuller description correctly calls volumetric video, a pattern that recurs across the consumer volumetric-capture industry of the mid-2010s.