Behind the Scenes: President Zelenskyy’s Holographic & AR Address to Europe’s Tech Community

With the help of our friends at Talesmith, Garden Studios, Evercoast and ARHT Media, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy addressed Europe’s tech leaders via 3D hologram, live from Founders Forum London 2022. He urged our community to donate to United24’s Rebuild Ukraine fund and invest in the digital transformation that will define the country’s long-term rebuild, highlighting Ukraine’s resilient development, despite the ongoing war. Talesmith’s founder, Martin Williams and Evercoast’s founding CEO, Ben Nunez, travelled to Kyiv to record the President volumetrically and ensure we delivered his message in 3D, showcasing the potential for Ukraine to leapfrog into a better, tech-enabled world, post-war. By broadcasting President Zelenskyy’s address via hologram and 3D avatar, our aim was to exemplify the world-changing innovation our community is capable of delivering and inspire our network to develop new technologies that can help rebuild Ukraine and promote truth dissemination. We worked with ARHT Media to bring their holographic capsule to three other European cities, enabling the President to appear on stage simultaneously at the UK’s Founders Forum, Stockholm’s Brilliant Minds, Amsterdam’s The Next Web and Paris’ VivaTech. We also live-streamed his telepresence to Dublin Tech Summit, London Tech Week’s AI Summit and SuperReturn Berlin, to bring the President’s message to nearly 200,000 leaders across every vertical of the tech industry. You can view President Zelenskyy’s address via Evercoast’s mobile augmented reality experience at . The volumetric capture hardware used for the project has been donated to the Ukrainian government, to enable continued communications in extended reality formats, and ARHT Media is donating the equipment used for the hologram capture to the Junior Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, located in Kyiv. Our mission at Founders Forum is empowering entrepreneurs at every stage of their journeys to drive positive change through technology. We are continually inspired by the creative technologies our community develops to solve problems and overcome challenges both big and small, and we believe wholeheartedly in tech as a force for good in the world. We believe in tech as a means of empowering democracies to prevail over autocracies. We are proud to have hosted several Ukrainian thought leaders at FF London 2022 including Dima Shvets, Viktoriya Tigipko, Igor Zhadanov, and Irra Ariella Khi. Thank you to The Kyiv Independent’s Olga Rudenko and Daryna Shevchenko who travelled from Ukraine to join us in person. Thank you also to Amanda Holden, Bernard Henri-Lévy, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Gayle King, Nile Rodgers, Oleksandr Balabanov, Ozwald Boateng and Peter Gabriel, who helped us amplify the President’s message and shared powerful words of support from the FF stage. Thank you to our generous community who contributed significant funds to United24’s Rebuild Ukraine Fund in addition to well over $1 million USD to Sunflower Relief’s humanitarian aid fund, in immediate response to President Zelenskyy’s address at FF London. Thank you to The New York Times, The Times and The Guardian, BBC and Rolling Stone for helping shed light on this project and expanding the reach of President Zelenskyy’s message. Thank you as well, to Thomas Hoegh, who created and produced the project alongside Talesmith’s Martin Williams, Mark Wright and Ruth Roberts. This is only the beginning – we stand with the Ukrainian people and are ready to do everything we can to help #RebuildUkraine. Please reach out to theteam@ if you’d like to get involved.