I Already Got My Hoverboard

When I tell people I’m working on a voice-controlled hologram ghost, the most common response I get is a bewildered, “Cool!”

I admit, it’s a pretty esoteric project, even by my standards. So why has this hologram ghost idea haunted me for many years? Is it a childhood thing? You better believe it’s a childhood thing! Specifically, an EPCOT thing.

After my parents divorced in the early 90s, my mom took my sister and I on yearly trips to Disney World. My dad hates Florida, muggy weather, and theme parks. So I think mom took us to Disney to permanently establish herself as the cool parent. Dad took us to the flea market and chamber music concerts, neither of which had Space Mountains. Though he also took me to see highly inappropriate movies in theaters, like Boogie Nights and Chuck and Buck, so depending on your definition of “cool,” maybe my dad was the cool parent the whole time? (I had an M. Night Shyamalan moment as I wrote this.)

Our favorite park was EPCOT. Particularly Future World, the showcase of technology and visions of the future, as dictated by EPCOT’s corporate sponsors. I loved the whimsy and masterful imagineering of Journey Into Imagination (the original version with Dreamfinder, not the mucked-up versions with Eric Idle), the Sega Saturn exhibit inside Innoventions (I had a Super Nintendo, so playing a Sega console felt like crossing over into an alternate dimension), and Ice Station Cool, a clever walk-through advertisement for Coca-Cola disguised as an attraction. The attraction ends with a sample station for Coke products from around the world, which includes the infamously bitter Italian soda Beverly. It’s worth trying once.

In a park full of dazzling promises about tomorrow, one idea captured my imagination more than the rest: video calls. In two rides, Spaceship Earth (the one in the dome) and the long defunct Horizons (the one that smelled like oranges), there were scenes where animatronic friends and families are shown connecting with each other from halfway around the world through video. I was a computer-loving kid with a brand new America Online account. Maybe the idea that telecommunications could catch up to Dick Tracy wristwatch fantasy was like catnip to me. Or maybe at a time when my family was breaking apart, I loved the idea that technology could be the glue that kept families together. Just thinking of the scene in Horizons where a baby boy’s family sings him happy birthday via holographic video screens from around the world still chokes me up. Even more than Beverly did.

Unlike some future technologies promised at EPCOT, video calls were already happening there. At the park! As you exited Spaceship Earth, there were these touchscreen displays called WorldKey Information Kiosks. (The name makes them sound positively scintillating.) At WorldKey, you could get instant information about EPCOT and its various attractions. They ran off LaserDiscs in server rooms and information traveled via fiber optic lines. That was neat in-and-of-itself, since touchscreens weren’t much of a thing in 1994, and certainly not when the Kiosks were installed in 1984. But here was the crazy thing: you could use the kiosks to video call a Disney live agent to ask park questions or book a restaurant reservation in World Showcase (the other side of the park). This was so exciting for my sister and I! The thing they said we could do someday on the rides? We could do that immediately! No waiting. No dreaming. We could video conference with a real person, in real time. Absolutely mind-blowing.

When I talk to people my age about “the future,” I often hear about the broken promise of hoverboards and flying cars. Without either of those inventions, the future has not arrived. But I already have my hoverboard. It’s FaceTime. When I called my mom and sister to ask what they remembered about WorldKey, I used FaceTime to chat with them. Video calls are ubiquitous now. We relied on them so much during the pandemic, people got Zoom fatigue. In my friend group, when FaceTime first came out, I was the one weirdo who would call people with it instead of texting like a normal person, because video calls remind me that if we can dream it, we can do it. Brought to you by AT&T.

Hologram ghost is my attempt to re-capture that childhood inspiration. But instead of a holographic call from halfway around the world, I want to make a call to another world entirely. It’s an EPCOT tribute with dashes of Star Wars and Ghostbusters. If my childhood self could experience this, they would say, “Cool!” Sans the bewilderment.

🎲 Your Turn: Have you ever gotten creatively inspired by a trip? A happy memory? A new technology? What technology do you feel is synonymous with “the future?” I’d love your thoughts! Reply directly to this email or hit the orange button below to discuss in the comments.