48 SMITHSONIAN.COM | December 2019
’M IN REDMOND, WASHINGTON, in a room
at Microsoft, pondering an all-terrain
vehicle that has a busted engine. I have no
idea how to fi x it. I’ve never done engine
repair before.
But I do have some help: On my head, I’m wearing the
HoloLens 2, Microsoft’s “augmented reality” device. It has
a see-through visor, almost like the one on a motorcycle
helmet, and the HoloLens projects images onto the visor so
they appear to fl oat in the air before you.
When I look at the vehicle, the HoloLens fl ickers to life,
and a guide to fi xing the engine pops up in the air. A blue
arrow points at a tableful of tools, and when I walk over to
it, the arrow indicates that I should grab a torque wrench.
Once I take that tool, a new arrow appears, beckoning me
across the room to a case of bolts. I grab a bolt, and a third
arrow shows me where on the engine to install and tight-
en it. In under two minutes I’ve completed the repair.
The sensation is bizarre, like living in a world of Harry
Potter magic. I can even touch the holograms. While I’m
doing another repair job, a virtual screen with the face
of a remote mechanic materializes before me to talk me
through the job. The screen is in my way, though—so I
grab it by the corner with my fi ngers, right there in the
air, and drag it off to the side.
It’s weird. It’s fun. And it is, argues Alex Kipman, the Mic-
rosoft engineer who invented the device, the future. “I have
no doubt that devices like this are going to be the pervasive
way of interacting with technology,” he tells me. Aroundi
AN ACE INVENTOR AIMS
TO WEAVE HOLOGRAMS
INTO THE FABRIC OF OUR
EVERYDAY LIVESREALITY
GETS AN
UPGRADE
by CLIVE THOMPSON
photographs by ANNIE MARIE MUSSELMAN“These constitutions,” she said in an interview, “I fi nd the
language around human rights in them inspiring.”
Schreck performed the longer version of the play in 2017 at
the Clubbed Thumb theater company, also in the East Village.
From there it gathered momentum, with runs at Berkeley
Repertory Theatre in California and New York Theatre Work-
shop. Performing in a small venue is one thing; telling a very
personal story to almost 600 ticket holders per show, which
she did for 169 performances at the Helen Hayes Theater on
Broadway, was an adjustment.
“I didn’t imagine the level of exposure,” she said. Talking
about her sex life, her abortion, her family’s unsettling histo-
ry in front of that many strangers was nerve-racking. So was
performing the play when one particular person—her moth-
er, Sherry Chastain Schreck—was in the audience for the fi rst
time. It was opening night on Broadway. “The fi rst perfor-
mance was hard—my mother was very emotional, I was very
emotional,” Schreck recalled. But, she added, Mom went back
several times.
The response from the audience also helped her get through
the discomfort, as she realized her tale was resonating. “The
biggest thing,” she said, “which I guess shouldn’t have sur-
prised me, is that people like to stay and tell me about their
own stories—a lot of people saying, ‘This reminds me of my
family,’ or talking about their own relationship just to being a
person in this country.”
On Broadway, where foreign tourists make up a signifi cant
part of the audience, she was often surprised at the ways in
which a play about America’s founding document spoke to
them. “I’ve talked to people from Japan, from Germany, Aus-
tralia, Canada,” she said. “They’ve said, ‘It makes me want to
look at our constitution.’ I had two Japanese women who told
me, ‘We struggle with all of this in our country.’ ”
And then there’s that freebie Schreck included with the
program. “People are so excited about receiving their Consti-
tution,” she said.
Schreck may have thought the Broadway run was the pin-
nacle for the play, but the engagement at the Kennedy Cen-
ter—with roughly twice as many seats as the Hayes—was a
new kind of high. At the end of the play, Schreck brings a high
school student ( Rosdely Ciprian in the Washington produc-
tion) onto the stage to debate her as to whether the Constitu-
tion should be scrapped entirely. Both of them felt a crackle in
the air at the Kennedy Center.
“The debate was more electrifying than it has ever been,”
Schreck said. “Both she and I realized that we were posing these
questions about reimagining what our country might be before
people who might actually have decision-making power.”
What if Schreck were to convene a real constitutional con-
vention to consider mending some of the document’s fl aws?
What would she focus on?
“I would put the explicit protection of human rights on the
agenda,” she said. Then she added emphatically, “I would cer-
tainly put the Equal Rights Amendment on there.”
BYLINES Neil Genzlinger television shows for the has reviewed hundreds of plays, fi lms and New York Times. WATCH A VIDEO of Kipman explaining his inspiration
for the Hololens at Smithsonianmag.com/ingenuity