Hologram doctors appear on the International Space Station

It's not science fiction, it's reality: NASA has become the world's first to bring a human to the International Space Station, demonstrating a whole new way for humans to communicate.

NASA has sent doctors to the ISS in a special experiment - from a Science Alert. The unusual event took place last October, when the space agency used holoportation technology to transport surgeon Dr Josef Schmid and his colleagues to the space station "reposted from“.

The technique, familiar from science fiction films, involves projecting a three-dimensional hologram of the user in real time into a given space. "It's a whole new way of human communication across distances" - said Schmid.

According to NASA, the technology was based on Microsoft's Hololens device, which was used for the first time to connect researchers on Earth with workers on the space station.

While the significance of the current experiment is undeniable, NASA is planning more similar meetings in the future, and even a two-way development of the holoportation is envisaged, with both sides "could be published on" a hologram.