It’s the classic awkward icebreaker: If you could invite anyone, dead or alive, to a dinner party, who would it be? Aristotle? Ailias is a company based in Surrey, UK, which promises to make that hypothetical a reality. It can reanimate historical and current legends with 3D hologram avatars that are fully conversational, knowledgeable, and can be delivered to you in a box.

The technology isn’t bespoke. Many companies provide life-size hologram displays for events and parties, everything from floating 3D displays of Santa’s sleigh or 3D Holo-Trucks. The physicist Dennis Gabor even won a Nobel Prize in 1971 for his work that led to holography, even though a life-size Elon Musk isn’t probably the result that he (or anyone) had in mind.

What sets Ailias apart is the company’s playful focus on history and education, which the company describes as “ultra character creation.” The company focuses on animating dead notable personalities into real-feeling conversational holograms, designed for interaction rather than spectacle. Ailias’ holograms can juggle, do squats, or even breakdance, making your party, exhibition or just about any event an extra special occasion.

Man in the Box

Ailias offers pricing on request, with costs varying depending on whether clients opt for rental, purchase, or whether you’re seeking bespoke characters and activation. When I visited the offices, director Adrian Broadway noted that a minimum week’s rental would run into the thousands of pounds, which includes software subscription costs, delivery, and installation.

Ailias’ current roster has over 70 characters that could be staged in their bespoke boxes, including Henry VIII, Beethoven, Julius Caesar, and a suspiciously sexy Cleopatra. That these are mostly historical figures is no coincidence—Broadway describes these boxes as great for educational settings or museum exhibitions, but admits it also has to do with copyright restrictions on characters as well.

In the United Kingdom, the use of someone’s identity for commercial purposes is treated as a trademark. (In the United States, the right to publicity is protected in some form in most states.) That is to say, if Ailias used a well-known or living celebrity, that would likely land the company in court. But a long-dead historical figure like Henry VIII is unlikely to cause trouble.

In this instance, Ailias had cleared the copyright concerns for the 7-foot-tall AI Albert Einstein, so after hitting the Start Chat button, I talked to Einstein about a wide range of topics, everything from science, music, to his thoughts on Elon Musk. He had a pleasant, soft German accent, and I was impressed at the response speed. Ailias notes that it takes under two seconds for each avatar to respond, which feels about right.

Photograph: Dulcie Godfrey

For an educational hologram, I often found myself answering more questions than I was asking. There were times Einstein felt like a large, animated ChatGPT conversation but with a German accent. This is to be expected, as Ailias relies on open source AI and third-party generative video to create the conversations. But there’s no sense of verisimilitude anyway, since Einstein wasn’t really 7 feet tall. I took the opportunity to ask, like an 11-year-old boy would, “Who would win in a fight, you or Isaac Newton?”

It held up as any AI language model would, deflecting back to its area of expertise by settling on a sensible, “It would be more of a fight of ideas.” In the aim of being at least semi-professional, that’s as far as I went. But I’d imagine the language model would do fine with most things a preteen could throw at it.