[advertising]

Package up a gimmick in a decent looking kiosk and pitch the “where won’t this work!?” dream. You’ll capture enough imagination in pitch meetings to raise a few mil. You’ll put together a team and manufacture your first batch, spending all of your first raise in the process. A few big name clients will pop-up and show interest, enough to go back to your investors for a just a bit more money to keep going. Big name clients do some one off deals, everyone is interested but if it could just do X or Y, you’ll chase custom requests and eventually arrive at the crossroads of becoming an event based marketing agency or riding a slowly fading business into the ground as the kiosks age and no new clients sign up after the hype is over.

Whether it’s touch screen mirrors, digital art club screens, cell phone charging kiosks, photo booths, sports training kiosks, screens on water faucets, it’s inevitably the same story arch.

The only ones I’ve seen that make money are those that pivot into high-ticket custom events which then you’re not a scalable startup anymore but an agency, or you barely get your investors bailed out by selling some backend tech you developed for stock in another company.

[jayparth]

"Pessimists sound smart. Optimists make money." —@natfriedman

[jldugger]

They also lose a ton of it =)

[Judgmentality]

Pessimists make money shorting the market.

[mNovak]

On that note, why aren't there more touch screen mirrors? Of all of these, that ones makes a certain amount of sense (being a 'screen' we already look at at least a few times a day). I've only ever seen the DIY ones, never a proper product.

[bg24]

That is how innovation progresses. These folks who burn weekends and evenings, often they fail. Many of them get up and go on to build something bigger for the society.

[hkmurakami]

Hey now, photo booths have been doing very, very well in Japan for 30 years! =D

[Hydraulix989]

I’m surprised seasoned investors haven’t pattern matched this yet.

[jariel]

Why would you assume this is a gimmick?

Is there something we're missing here? It seems fairly credible, and if it's enough like a hologram, that novelty will not fade, it represents quite a leap in communications (though will probably take some time to settle in).

[Hydraulix989]

That's exactly what this is, though. Pepper's Ghost is not a real hologram.

[jariel]

Ok - fair enough - but people don't care about 'what tech is used' what they care about is the experience.

So if you can create a really powerful '3D experience' using simple tech, than that's wonderful. That said, if it's crappy or doesn't work well from angles or whatever then that's not good either.

But let's not get confused in arguing about 'what a real hologram is' - because that's now what we really want, what we want is the 3D there may be other ways to achieve it.