Neon's 2020 launch page describes screen avatars, not holograms

What you see

At CES 2020 and on its own launch website, Neon presented what it called "artificial humans": video-like figures with human faces, shown on ordinary flat screens rather than in any headset or free-space projection. An archived capture of Neon's launch site from January 2020 describes the reveal in the company's own words: "NEON, our first artificial human is here. NEON is a computationally created virtual being that looks and behaves like a real human, with the ability to show emotions and intelligence," adding the figures are "100% visually real, like you and me" and inviting attendees to "experience the world's first live preview of CORE R3," the rendering engine. Nowhere on that page does Neon call its product a hologram; the word does not appear.

How it works

The launch page frames Neon as a software product: a "computationally created virtual being" driven by an engine named CORE R3, rendered close to real time and displayed on screens. Neon's current site, retrieved in 2026, describes the same idea while distancing it from other categories, stating Neon is "not an AI assistant," "not an interface to the Internet," and, notably here, not "3D avatars" either, describing itself as computationally generated video shown through devices called NEON View and NEON Frame. Both the 2020 and current material describe rendered video output, not any optical or projected display technique.

Viewing conditions and limits

Because Neon's own materials describe a screen-based product, ordinary viewing conditions apply: a flat display, ambient room lighting, and a viewing angle set by the screen rather than any free-space optical effect. Neither the 2020 launch page nor the current site claims mid-air projection, multiple simultaneous viewing angles, or headset-free free-space imagery — the features distinguishing an actual hologram or volumetric display from screen-based video. What the company claims, in both periods, is realism of the rendered human likeness, not the optical mechanism of its display.

What it is not

Neon's own 2020 and 2026 materials describe a rendered virtual human shown on a screen, not a hologram, a light-field display, or any volumetric projection covered elsewhere in this archive. Press coverage of the CES 2020 unveiling widely used science-fiction-adjacent language for the "artificial human" concept; that framing describes the AI and rendering ambition Neon promoted, not a display claim Neon's own launch page makes. The distinction matters: "artificial human" and "hologram" invite different, unrelated questions, one about how convincingly software can generate a human likeness, the other about how light reaches a viewer's eye.

• Is the "artificial human" shown on a screen, or in free space without a display panel?
• Does the company's own material use the word "hologram," or only words like "virtual being" and "avatar"?
• Would the figure look the same viewed from the side, the way a light-field or volumetric image would, or does it depend on the screen playing it?

Neon's actual claim was about AI-generated human realism rendered as video, not a new kind of physical display. Reading the launch material this way keeps a genuinely ambitious rendering claim separate from a display claim its own site never made.