Holocaust survivor Aaron Elster envisions a bright future for himself—as a hologram. Elster speaks regularly to groups at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Skokie, where he is vice president, but he knows that the era of in-person lectures from Holocaust survivors is running short. (At 82 or 83—he is not certain of his age—Elster is one of the younger survivors.)

So Elster hopes to achieve his long-term legacy through a new technology that's being tested at the museum: a holographic representation of Holocaust survivors that uses a Siri-like artificial-intelligence system that allows museum guests to converse with holographic survivors. In effect, the technology will let Elster and his peers continue engaging museum guests in question-and-answer sessions for decades.

“This is mind-blowing,” Elster said. “There's nothing like telling a story in person, but the survivors aren't going to be around that much longer. This technology is the closest thing, and it means we'll still be able to have an impact.”

The program being tested at the museum features Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter, who spent years working in a concentration camp in Poland after lying about his age to avoid execution. Gutter, 82, flew from his home in Toronto to Los Angeles, where he spent five days answering 1,800 questions about his Holocaust experience, surrounded by thousands of lights and cameras.The project was developed by University of Southern California researchers.

The testing at the Skokie museum is the first live-audience tryout for the technology and runs through the end of June, as the university team fine-tunes the algorithms that determine the answers elicited by the questions. For now, Gutter appears as a two-dimensional image, because the museum lacks the technology for three-dimensional display. Yet Gutter and his story still are larger than life, and he appears startlingly lifelike and responsive—except for a mouse arrow floating mysteriously above his right shoulder. His delivery is intimate, grandfatherly and varied, depending on the story he's telling; his voice rises and falls, and while sometimes he sits rigidly still, at times his brown loafers bob up and down in jittery motion.

Many survivors have told their stories on film and in other media (Elster, for example, has written a book), but the interactive storytelling model here is powerful, especially when it yields surprising answers. For example, a question about the days after Russian soldiers liberated Gutter's camp anticipated a triumphal answer, but instead Gutter recalled seeing the soldiers abuse German settlers. “When you suffer and you see other people suffering, the empathy flows from you.”