Teresa Kay Albertson | The Des Moines Register

Kelsey Kremer, kkremer@dmreg.com

Presidential hopeful Andrew Yang, an entrepreneur, hopes to go high tech in his nearly two-year campaign to better allow voters the chance to know him.

Yang is in talks with a California hologram company, which has worked with the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and the Country Music Awards, to beam images of himself across the country to spread the word.

"I would be highly surprised if there’s not an Andrew Yang hologram campaigning in various parts of the country by this summer,” Yang said in an interview with the Des Moines Register.

Kelsey Kremer/The Register

Yang, who declared his presidential candidacy in November 2017, has been discussing the idea with Hologram USA based in Hollywood.

Hologram USA has also collaborated with a European partner to facilitate hologram projections in European political campaigns, but Yang’s would be the first in the United States.

“This is a total dream that we are finally being exploited and being used in a way that it was invented for,” said Hologram USA’s Executive Vice President David Nussbaum.

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Nussbaum said he was contacted by a 2016 presidential candidate but that contract never came to fruition. Due to non-disclosure agreements, he didn't specify which campaign.

“We have the ability to beam anybody from anywhere to anywhere else in real time,” Nussbaum said. “And the audience would see Andrew Yang as if he’s really there. It doesn’t look like a Star Trek hologram. You’d swear he was there in person."

During his campaign, Yang has promoted the idea of a universal basic income, which would be monthly payments from the federal government to supplement every adult's earnings, in part to make up the gap for people who are losing or would lose their jobs to tech replacements.

"It just makes so much sense for Andrew Yang, for his technology format and his ability to see where we’re going in the future with technology," Nussbaum said.

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Election 2020: Andrew Yang, a Democrat campaigning for president in Iowa

The hologram technology would require Yang to be located within a studio in one location, and beam his image to a receiving studio in a second location. The first studio They could be in Yang’s campaign office in New York, while the receiving technology could be on a flatbed truck traveling around Iowa. It would allow people in Iowa to ask Yang questions and him to respond through his 3D hologram.

“In that way, it would be much closer to me being in the room, just like this,” Yang said during the interview. “We only want to use it if it is going to be of value and we need to bring it someplace convenient to you, otherwise it would defeat the purpose.”

Yang tested the technology at the Hologram USA studios and tweeted about an appearance on TMZ Live in April. The video shows a hologram of Yang dancing on stage with a hologram of Tupac Shakur, the late rapper and actor.

Yang said the cost of the hologram campaign tool would likely be in the six-figure range.