By Becky Ham | MIT Media Lab
In the dim light of the lab, friends, family, and strangers watched the image of a pianist playing for them, the pianist’s fingers projected onto the moving keys of a real grand piano that filled the space with music.
Watching the ghostly musicians, faces and bodies blurred at their edges, several listeners shared one strong but strange conviction: “feeling someone’s presence” while “also knowing that I am the only one in the room.”
“It’s tough to explain,” another listener said. “It felt like they were in the room with me, but at the same time, not.”
That presence of absence is at the heart of TeleAbsence, a project by the MIT Media Lab’s Tangible Media group that focuses on technologies that create illusory communication with the dead and with past selves.
But rather than a “Black Mirror”-type scenario of synthesizing literal loved ones, the project led by Hiroshi Ishii, the Jerome B. Wiesner Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, instead seeks what it calls “poetic encounters” that reach across time and memory.
The project recently published a positioning paper in PRESENCE: Virtual and Augmented Reality that presents the design principles behind TeleAbsence, and how it could help people cope with loss and plan for how they might be remembered.
The phantom pianists of the MirrorFugue project, created by Tangible Media graduate Xiao Xiao ’09, SM ’11, PhD ’16, are one of the best-known examples of the project. On April 30, Xiao, now director and principal investigator at the Institute for Future Technologies of Da Vinci Higher Education in Paris, shared results from the first experimental study of TeleAbsence through MirrorFugue at the 2025 CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Yokohama, Japan.
When Ishii spoke about TeleAbsence at the XPANSE 2024 conference in Abu Dhabi, “about 20 people came up to me after, and all of them told me they had tears in their eyes … the talk reminded them about a wife or a father who passed away,” he says. “One thing is clear: They want to see them again and talk to them again, metaphorically.”