Focus on historical characters as virtual presentations. Are there case studies such as George AI by The Torch, or projects by companies like Groove Jones? What is their market success? What are their production pipelines, cost, and personnel? Find many others.

Historical-character virtual presentations are a real product category now, but they are not one market. They split into four businesses with very different costs and success rates: closed-corpus “librarian” avatars, museum conversational installations, first-person survivor testimony systems, and cheap LLM chat apps that only look like history.

Groove Jones is the Dallas XR studio. They build avatars and museum interactives; they are not a historical-figure foundry the way Jumbo Mana or USC Shoah Foundation are.

George AI by The Torch

What it is. Glenn Beck’s Mercury Radio Arts product, launched with The Torch platform in January 2026. Beck presents George as a “librarian,” not a resurrection of Washington: a constrained model that answers from a private founding-era corpus (Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Franklin, Hamilton, plus Locke, Montesquieu, Blackstone, Cicero, Plutarch). The public cutoff is described as around 1820. A companion system, Glenn AI, is limited to Beck’s own verified output. Curriculum built on George is scheduled for 2027.

Presentation. The viral preview was a sit-down “interview”: Beck at a table with a modernized Washington in a black T-shirt and podcast mic. Beck interrupted the first answer and asked it to “dumb it down” and “speak in today’s language.” The resulting monologue (“America’s biggest problem isn’t political or economic. It’s all moral.”) was widely read as Beck’s own frame, not a neutral retrieval of 18th-century text. Beck’s own explainer insists George is not Washington and not a vehicle for staff opinions. Critics treated that claim as incomplete, because the system was also “fed… the conditions of what’s happening in America today.”

Commercial model. Torch Insider is $8/month ($96/year). The avatar is a membership feature inside a media bundle (ad-free radio, documentaries, member chats, AI-generated daily podcasts), not a standalone museum product. Educational curricula are a 2027 upsell. Beck has said compute is expensive and that unit cost should fall with scale. No independent subscriber count or George-only revenue has been published. Success so far is distribution plus controversy, not a measured learning outcome.

Pipeline (inferred from public claims).

1. Acquire / digitize a private document library (Beck claims one of the largest private founding-era collections).
2. Isolate the model from the open web (“electric fence”).
3. Human vetting and prompting.
4. Voice + on-screen talking-head for show segments.
5. Package inside an app/membership.

Personnel. Not disclosed in detail. Publicly: Beck as editorial owner; Foundation for American History as the civic wrapper; an in-house research/prompt team; unnamed AI/engineering vendors. This is a media + archive org, not a 3D studio.

Honest assessment. George is a RAG chatbot with a face and a brand. The interesting design choice is the closed corpus. The weak point is the same one every histobot hits: once you ask a dead person about 2026, you are writing a script, not retrieving a source. Market success will be decided by Torch retention and whether schools buy the 2027 curriculum, not by whether the avatar “is Washington.”

Groove Jones

Dallas studio founded 2015. 300+ awards. They sell GrooveTech: XR Avatar Scanner (volumetric guest doubles), FanScan (phone face-scan avatars), Avateer (live-puppeteered CGI host), computer-vision body tracking. Clients and venues include Perot Museum of Nature and Science (bird-flight body tracking), Dallas Aquarium (“Otter Chat” with Tommy the Otter), Salesforce Dreamforce (markerless “Einstein” surf avatar — the Salesforce mascot, not Albert), Pumpkin Nights, NCAA Final Four, Toyota VR training.

They are relevant as a production vendor if you want a historical character as an on-site activation: scan a performer, drive a CGI body live, drop it in a museum or event. They are not publishing Lincoln/Washington products of their own. Treat them as the implementation shop, not the historian.

Typical event scanner claim: 1,000+ scans/day per rig. Pricing is custom experiential, not public SaaS.

The rest of the field (many others)

A. Museum conversational installations (the closest analog to “virtual presentation”)

B. First-person testimony (the ethically strict end)

USC Shoah Foundation — Dimensions in Testimony. Survivors answer ~1,000–2,000 questions over ~5 days inside a multi-camera dome (originally 116 cameras at USC ICT). NLP maps visitor questions to real recorded clips. Not a generative “fake person.” Languages include EN, ES, HE, DE, ZH, RU, SV. Installed in museums worldwide; also in IWitness for classrooms. Pinchas Gutter was the prototype.

Costs published:

• Early Pinchas build: $1.8 million.
• Orlando Holocaust Center / StoryFile local survivor (2026): about $250,000 per subject all-in (capture, interface, equipment, education wrap).
• Eva Mozes Kor / similar: ~30 hours of interview → tens of thousands of Q–A pairings; museums license content + hardware monthly.

StoryFile is the commercial spin-out (Heather Maio and collaborators) selling interactive biographies beyond the Shoah collection. Same philosophy: record the living person, retrieve clips, do not invent testimony.

This is the only slice with a durable institutional market: museums must keep survivor conversation after the last witnesses die. Generative Washington does not have that urgency.

C. Cheap “talk to anyone” apps (volume, low fidelity)

• Hello History / Humy.ai (Facing It International, Sweden): 400+ then 1,210 figures, GPT-class models, 50+ languages, teacher tools. Claimed 200k+ downloads, 5M+ messages, 5,000+ teachers, 90+ institutions. Freemium; 20 free messages. This is the volume play.
• Jenova Roleplay Game Master, Character.AI historical bots, generic “talk to Socrates” wrappers — same stack, thinner scholarship.
• Academic one-offs: Joseph Lister RAG character (Heritage 2025); Hedy Lamarr “histobot” (Harder 2024/2026) that the builder later treated as a failure case about authorship.

Market success here is downloads and classroom seats, not ticket revenue. Historical accuracy is the product risk.

D. Stage “holograms” of the dead (entertainment, not education)

BASE Hologram / BASE Xperiential: Callas in Concert (2018–), Roy Orbison, Buddy Holly, Whitney Houston. Body double rehearsed 12 weeks; CG face; remastered recordings; live orchestra. ~9-month build. Reviews mixed (awe at the walk-on, complaints that a hologram cannot conduct or respond). Datanyze once listed ~$5.1M revenue / ~15 staff — treat as a directory estimate. Tours still book (Dallas Opera revival Oct 2025). This is estate + touring theatrical, $millions per title, not a museum kiosk.

Disney’s 1964 World’s Fair Audio-Animatronic Lincoln is the ancestor of the whole genre.

Market success — what actually works

There is no clean “historical avatar TAM.” Money shows up in five different P&Ls:

1. Museum attendance and grants. Dalí Lives and Bonjour Vincent succeed if they increase dwell time, press, and membership. They rarely sell as standalone SKUs.
2. Testimony licensing. Dimensions in Testimony / StoryFile: high capex per person, then multi-year museum licenses. The $250k–$1.8M figures are real.
3. Consumer subscriptions. Torch $8/mo and Hello History freemium. Avatar is a feature of a media or edtech bundle.
4. Touring entertainment. Callas-class holograms: ticketed nights, high production, estate deals.
5. Agency projects. Groove Jones, EquipVerse-class MetaHuman work, Jumbo Mana commissions. One-off fees.

Jumbo Mana is still a small shop (PitchBook/CB Insights: founded 2022, ~11–13 people, ~$30k disclosed raise plus a later €3M raise attempt; named logos include museums plus CMA CGM, Vinci, Galeries Lafayette, Amazon Alexa, European Council). That is studio success, not category domination.

Pattern: closed sources + a venue + a scholar on the credit list survive. Open-web “I am Napoleon” bots get users and then get fact-checked to death.

Production pipelines, cost, personnel

Four stacks, in rising cost.

1. Text histobot (Hello History, academic Lamarr/Lister, early George without the face)

• Sources: Wikipedia + selected biographies, or a curated corpus + RAG.
• People: 1 prompt engineer, 1 historian reviewer if you are serious.
• Cost: hundreds to low tens of thousands. Inference pennies per chat.
• Time: days to weeks.

2. Video presenter / deepfake (Dalí Lives, George AI on-camera, HeyGen-class twins)

• Sources: archival film (Dalí: 6,000+ frames, 1,000 hours of training), or a designed likeness.
• People: curator, copywriter, actor matching body type, voice actor, ML/compositor, editor. GS&P + Thinking Box + museum staff for Dalí.
• Cost: mid-five to low-seven figures for a flagship install; much less if you accept a modern talking-head and skip the deepfake.
• Time: months.

3. Real-time 3D conversational human (Vincent, Eleanor, Einstein, MetaHuman Biran)
Jumbo Mana’s published stages: kickoff (photos, voice refs, editorial brief, knowledge base) → data prep and 3D sculpt → app/UX + conversational AI → staged launch. Leeds Castle explicitly split the work: historians own the body; the model owns the answers. Voice is often a directed actor, not a clone, when no recording exists.

People on a serious museum build:

• curator / historian (non-negotiable)
• 3D character artist + costume researcher
• voice director + actor
• conversational designer + LLM/RAG engineer
• on-site integrator (kiosk, lighting, wake-word, languages)
• evaluator for hallucination and off-limit topics (suicide, living descendants, current politics)

Cost band that matches other digital-human work: roughly $80k–$400k for one hero museum character if you already have the engine; $15k–$80k if you accept MetaHuman + Pixel Streaming and a thin knowledge base; well under $10k if it is only chat. ETH Einstein and Orsay Vincent sit toward the high-craft end.

4. Volumetric testimony or touring hologram

• People: interview team, lighting/camera crew, NLP annotators, display engineers; or body double + VFX + director + live orchestra.
• Cost: $250k–$2M+ per person or title.
• Time: a week on set plus months of indexing — or nine months for Callas.

What to copy if you are building one

The projects that hold up share the same discipline:

• Say what the system is not. Beck does this on paper; the interview format undermines it. Leeds Castle and Shoah Foundation do it in the room.
• Bound the corpus. Letters (Van Gogh), verified quotes (Dalí), recorded answers (survivors), founding-era texts (George).
• Put a historian in the loop before launch and after logs show new question types.
• Separate likeness rights from voice rights from interpretive rights. Dead public-domain figures are legally easier and ethically harder.
• Measure dwell time, repeat questions, and correction rate — not “uncanny likeness.”

George AI is a media product that uses history. Groove Jones is a vendor that can stage a body. The museum line from Dalí Lives → Bonjour Vincent → Eleanor of Castile, and the testimony line from Dimensions in Testimony → StoryFile, are the actual case studies for “historical characters as virtual presentations.” Everything else is either a chatbot with a costume or a concert with a ghost.

please produce an .md version of the 125 sources suitable for use in Obsidian.
Then, Analyze Jumbo Mana's Bonjour Vincent pipeline and Explore StoryFile's Dimensions in Testimony and provide these as separate case study .md files.

Three Obsidian notes are in the artifacts folder.

1. Source list (125 entries, web:105–web:229)
YAML, topic index, annotated S105–S229, dedupe table, wikilinks to the two case studies.

2. Jumbo Mana / Bonjour Vincent
Pipeline in five stages (brief → 800–900 letters + van der Veen → 3D avatar → Orsay kiosk → Alexa / Rimbaud / Schweitzer afterlife), people, inferred cost, what the press got right and wrong.

3. Dimensions in Testimony and StoryFile
These are related, not the same product — the note opens with that, because DiT is USC Shoah Foundation and StoryFile is the commercial engine that grew out of Heather Maio’s concept. Covers the 5-day dome shoot, retrieval-not-generation rule, $1.8M Pinchas vs ~$250k Orlando StoryFile captures, and when to use this method instead of a histobot.

Drop all three into the same vault as Digital Humans — Source Bibliography.md. Wikilinks already point at each other.