Creating a hologram of a deceased person involves combining several technologies: a 3D digital model of the person, voice recreation from old recordings, and a display system that projects the image in a way that appears three-dimensional. The process ranges from simple DIY setups costing almost nothing to professional productions that run into six or seven figures. Here’s how each piece works and what’s realistically available to you.
How “Holograms” Actually Work
Most of what people call holograms, including the famous Tupac appearance at Coachella, aren’t true holograms at all. They use a 19th-century stage illusion called Pepper’s Ghost. A thin, transparent screen (glass or specialized film) is angled between the audience and the stage. A brightly lit image is projected onto or reflected off this screen, creating what looks like a translucent, three-dimensional figure floating in space.
When light traveling through air hits the glass or plastic screen, the change in material density causes some of the light to reflect toward the audience while the rest passes through, making the background still visible. The result is a figure that appears to stand in real space. Professional stage versions place the video source below or beside the stage and bounce it off a nearly invisible foil at a precise angle. Consumer-grade versions shrink the same principle into tabletop pyramid displays or small enclosed boxes.
True volumetric holograms, where light itself forms a shape you can walk around, do exist in research labs and a handful of commercial products, but they remain expensive and limited in size. For practical purposes, nearly every memorial hologram you’ve seen uses some variation of Pepper’s Ghost or a high-resolution flat display inside a specially designed enclosure.
Building the Digital Version of the Person
The most labor-intensive part is creating a realistic 3D model of someone who can no longer sit for a scan. Professional studios use a combination of existing photos, video footage, and sometimes body doubles to build a digital replica. Recent advances in 3D reconstruction allow software to generate an animatable human model from even a single 2D photograph, using mesh deformation and volume rendering to estimate depth, body shape, and facial structure from flat images.
The more source material you have, the better the result. Studios working on celebrity holograms typically gather hundreds of photos and hours of video from different angles and lighting conditions. For a personal memorial, you’d work with whatever exists: family photos, home videos, smartphone clips. A professional visual effects artist can use these references to sculpt a 3D face and body, then texture it with realistic skin, hair, and clothing. For simpler projects, some families skip 3D modeling entirely and use carefully edited video footage projected through a Pepper’s Ghost setup, which can be just as emotionally effective.
Recreating the Voice
AI voice cloning has made it possible to recreate a deceased person’s voice from surprisingly little source material. Services like ElevenLabs can generate a voice clone from as little as two to three minutes of clear audio. One user reported feeding a three-minute video clip of his deceased father into ElevenLabs and receiving what he described as a “scarily accurate” clone within minutes. You can then type any text and hear it spoken in that person’s voice.
Quality depends heavily on what you have to work with. Three minutes of clear speech produces strong results. Two seconds, as one person discovered with their grandmother’s voice, produces almost nothing usable. If your audio clips are short, some people have had limited success looping the same clip to meet minimum length requirements, though results vary. ElevenLabs’ professional tier requires at least 10 minutes of audio for its highest-quality cloning. Alternative platforms like Play.ht offer free tiers for testing before you commit.
Apple also builds a voice cloning feature called Personal Voice into iPhones and Macs, originally designed for people at risk of losing their ability to speak. It requires the person to record a set of phrases while alive, so it’s only useful for advance planning.
Making It Interactive With AI
Some families want more than a looping video. They want to have a conversation. A platform called StoryFile creates AI-powered recordings where a person (while still alive) films themselves answering hundreds of questions on camera. After death, visitors can ask questions and the system matches them to the most relevant recorded answer, creating the illusion of a live conversation. William Shatner created one of these for himself.
The technology is impressive but clearly bounded. StoryFile can only discuss topics the person actually recorded answers about. Ask it about the weather today and it will tell you it can’t answer because it’s a recording. Ask something outside its database and you’ll hear responses like “that stumps me” or “I’m afraid I don’t understand the question.” It’s closer to a sophisticated menu of video responses than a free-flowing AI conversation.
For deceased individuals who never recorded a StoryFile session, a different approach exists. HereAfter AI lets families upload stories, voice recordings, and photos to create a memory-sharing avatar that others can interact with. Pricing starts at $3.99 per month for up to 20 stories, with an unlimited tier at $7.99 per month. These aren’t visual holograms, but they can be combined with a holographic display to create something close to an interactive memorial.
Display Hardware Options
Once you have your visual content, you need something to display it. Options break down by scale and budget.
- DIY Pepper’s Ghost pyramid: You can build a small tabletop version using a smartphone and four pieces of clear plastic cut from CD cases or transparency sheets, angled into a pyramid shape. Cost is essentially zero. The effect is small but genuinely striking in a dark room.
- Consumer hologram displays: The Proto M is a dedicated tabletop hologram device that displays both prerecorded and real-time content. It currently runs $7,700 on preorder with an estimated 4 to 6 month delivery window, and includes a travel case and one year of software access.
- Professional stage setups: For events, memorials, or concerts, companies like Musion (which created the Tupac hologram) and PORTL build large-scale Pepper’s Ghost rigs with specialized projection foil, high-lumen projectors, and custom content creation. These projects typically cost tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on scale and content complexity.
The Typical Production Process
If you’re hiring professionals, the workflow generally follows these steps. First, the studio collects every available photo, video, and audio recording of the person. They use this to build or select the visual approach: a full 3D digital model for maximum flexibility, or edited and enhanced existing footage for a simpler result. Voice cloning happens in parallel if the hologram will speak new words rather than replay existing recordings.
A body double may be motion-captured to provide natural movement for the 3D model. The digital face is then composited onto the body double’s performance. For audio, the cloned voice is synced to the lip movements of the 3D model. The finished content is rendered as video and formatted for whatever display system you’re using. From start to finish, a professional production takes anywhere from a few weeks for simple video-based projects to several months for fully animated 3D recreations.
For a personal, low-budget version, you could realistically combine a voice clone from ElevenLabs with existing video footage displayed on a DIY Pepper’s Ghost setup in a weekend. It won’t look like the Tupac hologram, but it can be a meaningful way to preserve someone’s presence.
Legal Considerations for Digital Replicas
If you’re creating a hologram of a family member for private use, legal issues are minimal. But if you plan to display, distribute, or commercialize a hologram of someone else, publicity rights come into play. New York passed an updated right of publicity law in 2020 that specifically addresses digital replicas of deceased individuals. The law defines a digital replica as a computer-generated performance so realistic that a reasonable observer would believe it’s the actual person.
Protections for deceased performers (actors, singers, dancers, musicians) and deceased personalities (anyone whose name or likeness has commercial value) last 40 years after death. Using a deceased person’s digital replica in a commercial product, advertisement, or scripted audiovisual work without consent from their estate creates legal liability. California has similar protections. Exceptions exist for artistic works, parody, satire, and entertainment, but the lines aren’t always clear.
For personal memorials of your own family members, these laws generally don’t apply. They’re designed to prevent unauthorized commercial exploitation, not to stop a daughter from creating a hologram of her father for a private gathering.