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If you remember the name of one investor, it’s likely to be Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park, who will be working with Hologram on his NFT music project Ziggurats. Polychain Capital led the seed round, with participation from Nascent, Inflection, The Operating Group, Quantstamp, Neon DAO, Foothill Ventures, and South Park Commons. Unsurprisingly, it has attracted a mix of crypto-native investors who are bringing either financial or go-to-market support.
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The company’s AI model can supposedly emote any static avatars, but the startup has 100% of its power concentrated in NFTs. Beyond animating avatars during video calls, the startup also wants to apply its technology to creating short and long-form videos. A mobile application is also in the making. Hologram is working to add more sophistication to its solution by adding a hand tracking feature.
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Should I even be making eye contact with Cool Cat? I’m not quite crawling in my skin but it’s a new experience. The voice is from Pow, an eloquent, composed young founder, but the cat’s expressions are a bit numb, missing the sophisticated facial expressions of humans. This motion-captured avatar technology is no stranger to Vtubers, or virtual YouTubers who stream or upload videos using live anime characters.īut I am slightly taken aback when Pow appears as a virtual being - he didn’t warn me. “To create motion-tracked characters, it requires either high-cost hardware for in-depth tracking or certain platforms that do not have the best user experience, so our angle is really creating the tooling and application for users to become virtual characters with one click,” the founder says. Once the model is deployed to the browser, it then feeds the face tracking points captured by the camera into the avatar, which enacts the movements live. The technology has only been achievable in the last few years, with the speed and efficiency to run in real time,” explains Pow, adding that the AI model is trained using only publicly available data. “Think of it as a machine learning model compressed and deployed to the browser. Available as a Chrome extension, Hologram swaps out Pow’s real video feed with the cat avatar - which is part of an NFT collection called Cool Cats. from MIT, have created a desktop tool that uses machine learning algorithms to turn still avatars into motion-tracked ones. Pow, who worked at 0x Labs, a decentralized exchange protocol builder, and his co-founder Hongzi Mao, a computer science Ph.D.
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Hologram wants to change that by bringing NFT avatars to life. But these blockchain-verified jpegs have limitations they are static and don’t reflect changes in one’s physical self. NFT avatars have become a common sight on social media platforms, representing their owners’ identities and status. The visor may be hiding a Cheshire cat grin because Pow has raised $6.5 million for his San Francisco-based startup Hologram Labs, just seven months after launching. As I speak to Tong Pow over Google Meet, he appears as a cartoon medieval-helmet-clad cat that talks and bobs its head, mirroring Pow’s movement behind the webcam.