Dimensions in Testimony is interactive video, its own page says

What you see

Visitors at museums including the Illinois Holocaust Museum and the Cincinnati Museum Center sit facing a video screen and ask spoken questions to a recorded Holocaust survivor, who answers in real time from pre-recorded footage. USC Shoah Foundation's own project page describes this as letting people 'ask questions that prompt real-time responses from pre-recorded video interviews,' naming survivors including Pinchas Gutter, Stanley Bernath, Max Glauben, Marian Turski and Lea Zajac de Novera. No headset is used; visitors sit or stand in front of a screen much as they would for any video display.

How it works

USC Shoah Foundation's own page says the project 'integrates advanced filming techniques, specialized display technologies and next generation natural language processing,' and a companion ICT article describes 'multi-camera, multi-angle filming' of survivors answering many questions in advance. That article quotes researcher Paul Debevec describing the goal as 'a believable, almost physical-feeling presence' through what he calls 'holographic projection technology,' while the Foundation's own page avoids 'hologram' and calls the result an 'interactive biography.' A natural-language system then selects the recorded answer matching each visitor's spoken question.

Viewing conditions and limits

ICT's own news post confirms the exhibit is installed as a permanent installation at the Cincinnati Museum Center, one of several fixed museum sites USC Shoah Foundation's page lists, rather than a touring show. None of the pages opened here state the exact camera count per survivor, the display hardware, or how many questions each survivor recorded answers for. Because each survivor answers only pre-recorded questions, the system can respond only within material captured during filming, not to entirely novel questions.

What it is not

USC Shoah Foundation's own project page deliberately avoids calling this a hologram, describing it instead as an interactive biography built from filmed interviews and natural language processing, even though the foundation's own page notes press coverage, including a piece titled 'Are Holograms the Future of How We Capture Memories?', has used that word. This is not a free-space or volumetrically displayed image: it is 2D video played on a standard screen, selected in response to a spoken question, closer to a very sophisticated interactive video kiosk than to any of the volumetric or light-field displays this site covers elsewhere. The 'holographic' language used by one ICT-linked researcher describes an aspiration toward presence, not the actual display technology installed in museums.

• Ask whether an 'interactive testimony' or 'hologram' exhibit displays 2D video on a flat screen or uses a volumetric or light-field display.
• Ask how many questions a subject recorded answers for, since that sets the real boundaries of what the system can respond to.
• Ask whether the installation is permanent or touring, since USC Shoah Foundation's own page lists both temporary and permanent museum sites.

This project is a useful case precisely because the organisation running it avoids the word 'hologram' in its own materials, even as outside coverage and at least one affiliated researcher use it more loosely.