Holographic conversational agents for education

Abstract Conversational agents in universities are mostly screen-based and lack the presence needed for confident, back-and-forth teaching. We introduce life-sized, AI-powered Holographic Conversational Agents (HCAs) that run on Proto displays and portray Ada Lovelace and Averroes for use in education and public engagement. The paper makes three contributions. First, it sets out a documented, reproducible pipeline that takes still or video assets to an interactive, source-grounded, safety-checked avatar suitable for live education. Second, it details an EDI-informed persona design, pairing a woman in computing with a non-Western scholar, with deliberate choices about voice, accent and knowledge sources to support inclusive engagement. Third, it reports a mixed-methods evaluation with staff and students in real settings, showing strong perceived usefulness, engagement and social presence, with clear intent to reuse in classes and exhibitions. Results confirmed high perceived value, across 51 participants, 85.7% of all ratings were positive; Engagement averaged 4.31/5 (85.3% positive) and recommendation 4.37/5 with 88.2% rating 4–5. We close with practical guidance for building new subject-specific HCAs from the pipeline and deployment notes for classrooms, labs and galleries, positioning life-sized holography as a viable format for dialogic teaching with historical figures, with perceived credibility supported through source-grounding and scope boundaries.