Perspective Chapter: From Avatar Technology to Interactive Holographic Digital Twin

The present work discusses developing and applying interactive digital twins and their holographic rendering as new tools to enforce emotional engagement in learning environments and digital museum experiences. In this work, we will demonstrate how a digital twin—an avatar made extremely realistic through the learning of the speaker’s silhouette, facial expressions, gestures, and voice during the model’s learning and construction phase—provides the user with an exceptionally immersive, realistic, and captivating learning experience. The authors first discuss the developments in avatar and digital twin technologies, on the way toward ever more responsive data-driven holographic twins that would mimic human behaviors and reactions while being recorded with real-time emotional responses from museum visitors. The new framework now combines artificial intelligence, holography, and natural language processing to give a customized educational experience while emotionally engaging the viewer through a system that harmonizes third-party solutions, like HeyGen AI to create avatars, which are modeled on real people; the Holo Tube holographic projector to create a 3D digital twin; and Gamma AI to produce content presentations that are highly engaging and visually appealing. The novel methodology introduced can be applied in many domains and reveals the higher potential of digital twins than avatars, for improving educational environments while creating immersive emotionally engaging experiences in museums, thus opening new ways of engaging with cultural heritage.