Holograms: from sci-fi to reality? Not quite

By Marc Ambasna Jones 11 Feb 26 Reading time: 4 mins

For decades, holograms have served as shorthand for futuristic collaboration; impressive demos that promise presence, intimacy and realism, but rarely survive contact with real-world infrastructure. A new European research project led by Capgemini suggests that something more interesting may now be happening. Not that holograms are suddenly ready for everyday use, but that they are emerging as one of the most demanding digital workloads modern networks are likely to face.

The project focuses on real-time, volumetric collaboration: capturing, processing, and transmitting three-dimensional representations of people so they can interact remotely with a high degree of fidelity. According to Capgemini, the work “confirms the potential of Beyond 5G (B5G) and 6G networks to deliver highly demanding immersive services, specifically real-time holograms and advanced XR services powered by edge computing.”

What is key here is less the hologram itself than what it demands from the system underneath.

Unforgiving technology

Unlike conventional video conferencing, volumetric collaboration is unforgiving of delay, jitter, and inconsistency. Movements must align closely with speech. Visual detail must update in near real time. Even small lapses in synchronisation can undermine the sense of presence that makes the interaction worthwhile.

This is why holographic collaboration is better understood not as an interface innovation, but as a stress test for digital infrastructure. It pushes networks, compute, and coordination mechanisms in ways that simpler workloads can easily mask.

As Peter Marshall, a former executive at Ericsson and the National Physical Laboratory, now an industry specialist with Federated Telecoms Hubs, argues, mobile connectivity has already undergone a fundamental shift.

“For years, mobile connectivity was all about speed. How fast you could download a file or view a video,” says Marshall. “But due to the broad range of new capabilities introduced by 5G, it has opened the door to a much wider range of opportunities.”

In immersive collaboration, that shift becomes critical. Marshall points to the importance of low-latency performance enabled by standalone 5G architectures.

“In the case of real-time holographic communication, 5G Standalone allows a near real-time response to every action,” he explains. “Imagine having a 3D holographic call where the movement of your friend felt out of time with the conversation. That level of intimacy and high fidelity would be lost and the discussion would likely be much shorter.”

Auto allocation

Capgemini’s research highlights how newer mobile architectures can allocate network resources dynamically, matching capacity, latency, and reliability to the needs of specific services. The consortium describes how real-time monitoring can detect when congestion begins to degrade holographic streams, automatically triggering network mechanisms that prioritise traffic and preserve performance.

This ability to dedicate resources, often described as network slicing, reflects a broader shift in how networks are designed. Rather than acting as neutral pipes, they increasingly embed intelligence, constantly assessing conditions and selecting optimal resources for each application.

“5G can ensure there is no disruption to the call even in exceptionally busy situations,” Marshall says. “With intelligence embedded in the network, it can continuously assess and select the most appropriate resources for that service.”

For applications such as holographic collaboration, this intelligence is not optional. High-fidelity interaction makes timing visible. Any mismatch between expectation and response is immediately apparent to users, which is why these applications expose weaknesses that flatter digital services can hide.

Business driven

Holograms may never become a mainstream collaboration tool. The hardware, energy cost, and operational complexity remain formidable. But that is not the point.

As organisations experiment with richer forms of remote interaction, from digital twins and remote inspection to immersive training and creative collaboration, the same constraints surface. Latency, synchronisation and reliability become business issues, not abstract engineering concerns.

Capgemini argues that these demonstrations “lay the groundwork for the future of XR applications across sectors such as remote industrial maintenance and advanced education, where instant, high-fidelity collaboration is vital.” In that sense, holographic collaboration sits alongside AI training clusters and autonomous systems. These are not products in search of users, but workloads that reveal where today’s infrastructure assumptions begin to strain.

They also help explain why future network discussions are moving beyond headline speeds. If earlier generations focused on throughput, the road to 6G is increasingly framed around coordination, responsiveness, and system-level intelligence.

Reality check

The risk with holograms is to treat them as another speculative interface, destined either to transform work or fade into obscurity. A more useful view is to see them as a lens into performance capabilities.

They reveal how fragile high-fidelity digital interaction can be, how dependent it is on invisible infrastructure choices, and why the next phase of network evolution is less about spectacle than control.

Holograms may not yet be real. But as a way of exposing the limits of today’s networks and the demands of tomorrow’s, they are, it appears, already doing something valuable.

Marc Ambasna Jones / Working as a technology journalist and writer since 1989, Marc has written for a wide range of titles on technology, business, education, politics and sustainability, with work appearing in The Guardian, The Register, New Statesman, Computer Weekly and many more.

Working as a technology journalist and writer since 1989, Marc has written for a wide range of titles on technology, business, education, politics and sustainability, with work appearing in The Guardian, The Register, New Statesman, Computer Weekly and many more.