A hologram to remember: Pam and Bill’s love story

Hello and welcome to Tech Life, the programme about technology and the impact it has on all of our lives. I'm Shona McCallum. Today we're looking at how it's possible to remember a loved one by recreating their lifelike image, expressions and voice using hologram technology. In a moment we'll bring you one quite remarkable story. Later on if you've had a knee operation

and have a smart device monitoring your health, the doctor might want to see you now. They're already tracking step counts. A lot of people who have an iPhone, for example, will be well used to opening up their health app

and seeing their step count. And virtual glucose monitoring tech for diabetics with the help of AI. We start today's programme with themes of grief and loss, but also of happiness and remembering

loved ones. If you've recently lost someone close to you, you might want to step away for this part of the programme. Now we talk a lot on tech life about how technology is shaping the way we live, but sometimes it also changes the way we say goodbye. Pam Cronrath lives in rural Washington state in the US, when her husband Bill, her partner of 60 years passed

away, she wanted to honour a promise she'd made to him, a super wake. What she created surprised everyone in the room. Working with hologram technology companies Proto and Hyper Real, Pam arranged for a life like hologram of Bill to appear at his own memorial service, speaking directly to family and friends. Let's start with Bill himself, who was

affectionately known as the rat. Hello everybody and welcome to your first and only rat wake party. Now before anyone gets confused I'm not actually here in Valhalla with you today. I left this earth in September 2025 but thanks to a company called HyperReal, you still get me the rat in hologram form. Is this going to

be fun? That was Bill, not a recording played on a screen, but a full-size hologram created using archived video and audio and carefully scripted by Pam herself. I started by asking her, why a hologram?

I was presenting at a medical conference several years ago, and they had a guest speaker that was a doctor. There was a hologram on the east coast, and I was on the west coast. I was so impressed with that, that when Bill passed away, I started knocking on doors

to try to see if I could do something like that, because I love technology too. I promised him a super wake years ago, so when he did pass away and he had told me at that time, Why don't you really go all out and spend a couple thousand dollars?

Well, as I have told everybody since, and I've probably been at least 10 to 15 times his $2,000 on this project, but I still think he would be inspired by all of this and thankful that it happened. Me knowing him like I did for 60 years, I wrote the script for the hologram.

and we pulled it off with my nephew being the emcee like it was him interviewing Bill. At the memorial, Bill's hologram didn't just speak, it answered questions. Pam arranged a live style Q&A with Bill's nephew acting as master of ceremonies, so convincingly that some people in the audience believed the conversation was happening in

real time. We're going to start with jumping in the wayback machine. Going back to your wedding date, October 6, 1967. Everything's ready except the groom.

You're 21, you just quit college, joined the Navy Reserves, and you're late to your own wedding. Was it all getting a little too real?

I found Pam and said, I think we should wait. Maybe we need more time. Pam, in the very assertive tone she is known for,

I don't care if we get a divorce tomorrow. We are getting married now. And here we are, 60 years later, no divorce. Best decision I ever didn't make.

Pam, I love you. Behind the technology was a very human motivation, grief, memory and love. And that's where this story really begins.

What was it like seeing him recreated in that way? Because it was very lifelike, and it's something that you'd worked on for many months. Well, the voice is critical.

I think that's the hardest part of all of this is getting the voice right. And Bill was a quiet, humble guy, not like me. And we didn't have a lot of recordings of him

that we could pull from. And I had to go back a lot of years. And, you know, even when you go back like we did, your voice changes over those 20 years or whatever.

So not maybe as dramatic as you might think, but especially when Bill had gotten weaker the last few years here, his voice, I think, had changed. So I had some recordings that I shared with Tim Coleman, who finally did do the major work on developing the avatar.

I had sent him a recording of Bill when his voice was younger, stronger, and one that was more just like a year ago or so. He kind of basically, in my opinion, went between them. It was everybody that listened, including my son.

This was a surprise for the whole family. The only people that knew what we were doing was my nephew and he and I with a hyperreal and proto, but my kids.

So you talk about watching them sitting in the one where we're sitting around the table when the proto came out. They're just, I don't have enough pictures

to show how aghast they were so surprised about what was going on and what was happening. When Bill came on that avatar and started speaking, I mean, he felt like it was his dad right there

talking to him, all the family did. So you were pleased with the results then? Yeah. And I had it recorded, the whole wake was recorded

and I was just listening to it again. And yeah, it means a lot to me. Yeah, especially what he says, I love you, you know? On the team.

I'll give you just a wee moment. Okay. What do you think he would have made of it? He would have been so over the top for him too.

I had never talked to him about that I saw that hologram. It sounds like something out there, like a AI world that you know you can't really relate to.

You know what I mean? And yeah, he would have just, just like my kids, he would have thought it was something else, but he would have loved it.

So how did you choose the words then that Bill spoke?