When Your Boss Becomes a Hologram

As chief executive officer of Columbia Shipmanagement Ltd., Mark O’Neil typically makes dozens of trips a year to far-flung locales for meet-and-greets with the 17,000 crew members of the 400 vessels his company operates. In January he showed up in 3D, 6-foot splendor at a conference in Manila—but traveled just a few miles from the company’s Cyprus headquarters.

O’Neil participated in the event as a life-size hologram inside a 7-foot-tall box, and he was able to interact with the audience via a screen in Cyprus. Columbia plans to use the technology to train workers without having to fly people around the world, and O’Neil likes the idea so much that he’s planning to purchase more units for other offices. “It was a real ‘beam me up’ moment,” he says. “They felt I was really there.”