Hologram greeting

The idea

The homepage already works like an interview, so the opening image should feel like someone picking up the call. In science fiction, people talk across distance through holograms: a figure drawn in blue light, floating over a projector, flickering when the signal is weak. UX designers grew up on those interfaces. This experiment asks whether that same feeling can greet a visitor here, built from nothing but my headshot and code.

How it works

There is no 3D scan and no image generator. The browser reads my portrait through a gentle fisheye, which magnifies the middle and bows the edges, turns it into thousands of points, and lays them on a shallow lens curve. Each frame the points are rotated toward the cursor, projected with perspective, and drawn as light. An earlier version sculpted the points into a head shape, but it read as an egg, so I went back to the plain photo. Each version above is a small set of settings on that one renderer, which is what makes it cheap to try new ideas.

• Scanlines. Points sit in tight horizontal rows, the signature of every movie hologram.
• See-through center, glowing edges. Surfaces facing you thin out and the silhouette glows, so it reads as projected light rather than a picture.
• Projector. A lit emitter with a cone of light grounds the figure instead of letting it float loose.
• Rare glitches. Every few seconds a band of rows slips sideways with a colour fringe. Kept quick and infrequent so it never becomes flashing, and off for anyone who prefers reduced motion.

What I'm watching for

Restraint. Too many glitches and colour effects and this turns into a fan tribute instead of a design detail. It also has to share the homepage with the constellation, which is the real way into my work, so the hologram should act like a host, not a headline. And light mode can never be as magical as dark, because light needs darkness to glow against.

Next

Version 03 Close-up had a trial run on the homepage, including a version that dissolved into my photo. Next to the constellation, a face competed with the work for attention, so it came back to the Lab. If it returns, it will be as the interviewer: when a visitor starts the interview, the figure docks beside the conversation and flickers gently while each answer streams in, as if it is speaking.