There’s something thrilling about seeing yourself as a hologram. At least that’s what I tell myself as I watch my AR alter-ego in the lobby of augmented reality start-up HoloMe’s sleek bright offices by London Bridge.

“It’s all about creating a more emotional, more immersive way to communicate,” founder Janosch Amstutz tells me as we watch holographic me twirl and pose on my phone screen. It turns out seeing yourself in AR form is as unsettling as it is entertaining,

Amstutz doesn’t usually do this for visitors – his new DIY hologram app launches to the public in the next couple of months — but today he makes an exception. It’s the best way for me to get my head around something my imagination had always reserved for sci-fi films and Years & Years season two.

But Amstutz is on a mission to make this a reality in 2019. Over the last year, he and his team of techpreneurs have worked with companies from Warner Music to H&M to make their AR dreams come true: they recently helped London College of Fashion to host the world’s first real-time AR fashion show; French Eurovision star Amir produced an AR music video with HoloMe in May; and ASOS recently trialled a new “virtual catwalk” feature that beams a lifelike human hologram into your bedroom to model the clothes.

There’s plenty more to come: an (undisclosed) Champions League football team currently has a contract with Amstutz to beam new signings into fans’ living rooms.

Surely there’ll be a holographic FaceTime successor by the time I’m a grandparent? You joke, says Amstutz, but he’s working on it. He and his team are currently paired with a major B2B communications provider to launch their tech as “the next evolution of Skype”. He asks: “What if I could see my nephew, for example, being recorded doing his next skateboard trick? He could be recorded like that and I could see it in my office.”

Would it need lots of tech? I visualise my bedroom kitted out with hundreds of cameras. “Absolutely not,” he insists. “That’s what’s important about our tech: you could use a standard £80 webcam.” While other firms use expensive hardware — often up to 120 cameras — HoloMe’s solution requires one simple video camera (and soon, just a smartphone).

The results are almost instant and it requires less data than other companies: ASOS’s AR tool needs just 7MB. “Traditional 3D-scanning would need about 100MB,” Amstutz says. How soon will his “holographic Skype” tech be available? “We can do it already,” he adds.

UCL is conducting a study into the effectiveness of and demand for this kind of communication. “Do people want to hold their smartphone for a 30-minute conversation? That’s debatable,” says Amstutz, explaining AR glasses like Google Glass could help solve this problem. Then again, “people used to say it would be ridiculous to hold your phone for an hour to watch a movie but people do that all the time now.” HoloMe is on a commercially available version of Amstutz’s “holographic Skype”, and hopes to launch a DIY portal early next year: an app that lets users send holograms of themselves to friends.

The uses go beyond gaming and entertainment, from holographic GP appointments to training in hazardous areas. “Can we beam in trainers to assist workers in a decommissioning facility?” Amstutz asks. He’s been approached by the UN about transmitting experts into policymakers’ chambers, and a bank has shown interest. “You could press a button and have the banker pop up in your living room.” Will the ASOS project soon let users see how a dress fits on their own body? No: “We capture the world as it is, so we don’t put clothes on human beings that don’t actually have those clothes on.” He references the “uncanny valley” effect: the unsettling feeling people experience when robots and simulations closely, but not quite convincingly enough, resemble humans.

“If the garment is almost perfect, but doesn’t fit on the avatar perfectly, the communicative power is lost.” Instead, Amstutz sees a move towards deepfakes — AI being used to create realistic videos of things that never happened. It has a dark side: one Redditor posted Scarlett Johansson in compromising sexual positions.

However, Amstutz predicts a demand for “certified deepfake videos”. Imagine you’re Cristiano Ronaldo. “You’d be able to have a message personalised for one of your 400 million followers. If it’s their birthday you could send them a private message of you saying, ‘Happy birthday Katie from London.’” he explains — rather fittingly, on my 26th birthday.

Next year, I’ll know what to wish for.

HoloMe