This Swiss start-up wants to help us empathise

What if you could beam people into your world, not using futuristic equipment, but a smartphone? This is what HoloMe, a Swiss start-up in London, sees as the future of communication.

In the lead up to October’s parliamentary elections, this is the sixth in a video series dedicated to looking at how political decisions affect the everyday lives of Swiss people. 

Janosch Amstutz lives in London and has raised capital there for his start-up. Originally from Zug in Switzerland, he grew up on a hippy commune in Australia, and says communication has always been very personal and important to him.

Amstutz thinks Augmented Reality is going to change the way we use technology and remove the need to look down at a phone. As more and more AR is seen on the market, people are becoming more accustomed to it, and coming up with new ways to put it to use. Pokemon Go – an AR game craze that swept the world – is probably the most well-known example to date.

But for Amstutz, AR is more than a fun toy – it’s a communications game-changer. What if a Syrian refugee could stand in front of you as a hologram and directly tell you their story? The big idea behind HoloMe is how to bring this technology into people’s lives without needing expensive, high-end equipment or using lots of data to interact with the experience. This is the story of how they’re doing it.

The Generation Global series so far