ARHT Media Files For Bankruptcy; Hologram-ish Display Solution Doesn’t Realize Needed Scale
October 4, 2024 by Dave Haynes
A Toronto company marketing its take on those shower stall-like transparent LCD displays has filed for bankruptcy and ceased operations at a main and satellite offices, laying off staff and contractors
ARHT Media is/was among a handful of startups selling a solution that is mostly about enabling remote appearances by capturing people in front of a green screen (or white screen), and then relaying the video feed to a remote location. The big enclosures are large enough to show people at life-size, and the proponents pushed the idea that they were holograms.
They’re not, and the term I use for them is hologram-ish. Clever video capture lighting and bright display lights with the enclosure create the illusion of depth, helped along by shadows.
The concept of enabling remote appearances by people who can’t make it in person is sound, and the best known effort involving ARHT was a 2022 appearance by Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, at several conferences far from Kiev. Zelensky stood in front of a whitescreen and camera set-up in Ukraine’s capital and was “beamed” to audiences at several conferences in European cities.
The challenge with this is cost – both in hardware and execution. The big old displays are not cheap, nor is a video capture set-up, and event logistics and ops. So companies marketing this solution need to get a lot of them out there and mainstream their use.
The press release about ARHT folding suggests as much:
While ARHT has been successful in reducing its overall cost structure, it has been unable to secure the additional financing required to fund the operations until such time as it achieves large scale rollouts of its holographic products.
Along with the main company unfortunately going down, the subsidiaries are also done: ARHT Media USA, Inc. (a California company), Be There Networks Inc. (a California company), ARHT Media UK Limited (a UK company), ARHT Media Singapore Pte Ltd. (a Singapore company) and ARHT Asia Limited (a Hong-Kong company).
ARHT was founded in 2014 and was publicly traded as an over the counter stock on the TSX Venture Exchange.
So I guess my question here is what is the relationship ARFT had with Proto, if any, and what impact this news has on that firm. The technology marketed by ARHT looks eerily similar if not exact to what Proto uses.
No relationship that I know of. AHRT appears to have been “inspired” by Proto. There are companies in the UK and Netherlands doing same sort of thing and undoubtedly some in China.