IT Blog

Cisco will announce on Tuesday that it’s getting into the hologram business. At its WebexOne customer conference, it’ll describe a new service called Webex Hologram, which enables virtual meetings in augmented reality—with the participants represented as photorealistic holograms instead of cartoon-like avatars.

I got an early look at the new service and spoke to two of the Cisco executives leading the development of the service, which runs on headsets including Microsoft’s HoloLens and Magic Leap’s Magic Leap 1. The discussion started out as a conventional Webex call, but then I put on the HoloLens the company had sent me and the meeting went 3D.

I was sitting at the little bistro table in my kitchen, and suddenly Cullen Jennings, Cisco’s CTO for security and collaboration, showed up right across the table from me. His hologram, looked impressively lifelike.

And that’s exactly the point of Webex Hologram–to evolve remote collaboration from old-school video conferences…