Ever since I was a kid, I hoped that I'd live to see the day when we have proper holograms as I saw in Star Wars. Of course, I hoped that real-life holograms would be a little higher quality than the fuzzy, often broken-up counterparts in the sci-fi series, and it looks like I'm mostly getting my wish thanks to Meta.
At Meta Connect 2026, the company debuted a new type of digital avatar system it simply calls Holograms. The company has substantially revised its avatar system over the years, from the extraordinarily ugly original release to 2024's modern upgrade, and now avatars are getting a truly realistic makeover, starting in WhatsApp calls.
Holograms are made from scans you take with your smartphone using Meta's app. During my demo, I completed a scan to be used on Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses and standard WhatsApp calls, which took about 60 seconds to set up. During the onboarding process, the app had me turn my head in a few different directions, then answer some questions out loud so it could learn my mannerisms.
The Meta rep then put on his Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses, walked into the other room, and called me from the glasses. When I answered the WhatsApp call, he appeared on screen as if it were any normal day, not wearing glasses at all. Despite what my eyes were telling me, the video I was seeing was not actually him; it was his Hologram.
You can see the difference in the video above, which shows me on the video call (with my Hologram on the phone), then a close-up of the phone showing the rep's Hologram followed by his real video. The results are uncanny. Even, perhaps, a bit scary.
As you might have imagined, this all uses Meta AI to function. The initial 60-second scan I described earlier is followed by a 5-10 minute server-side processing time, where Meta AI creates a personalized model of your imagery for Hologram-friendly apps. On Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses, this video call appears right on the glasses display and is designed to give the other person a way to see you on the call without needing cameras on the glasses looking at you.
This tech gets even more amazing when you answer a call in VR. For the demo, I used Meta VR Glasses, which give me full-color passthrough video to see the room around me. Calls normally appear in a floating window and show the same Hologram you'd get when using WhatsApp on a phone, although Holograms in VR have a 3D spatial quality to them.
Things get even cooler when you tap the full person button, as the call window melts away and the person is suddenly standing in front of you in the room with their correct height and proportions. It's a real-life hologram, and it moves impressively convincingly along with the person's voice and inflection.
There's no need to have a device that supports full-body tracking or anything like that, either. Meta AI is smart enough to understand human behavior and bases gestures and movements on the way you moved in the setup. In this case, she was wearing the same outfit in her Hologram that she was in real life.
You can walk around the room, and the Hologram will stay in place, although it will always be facing you. You can also move it around the room, or resize it to put it in a better place. Holograms are part of the Meta ecosystem and can even be adapted to work in different apps via an API. That means you could see your Hologram appear in more than just WhatsApp or Meta VR products in the near future.
Meta has been working on this technology for years, originally calling it "codec avatars," but renaming it for the final release to something more understandable. It's a massive leap in quality compared to what we have now, and I can't wait to use it more as it nears the final release in the coming months.
