Though Geekosystem editor Max Eddy touched on it in his excellent piece regarding the implications of the Tupac hologram that “performed” at Coachella, you may want a more easily digestible explanation of how the illusion actually worked. Luckily for the Internet or anyone who might want to create freaky holograms of dead celebrities on their own time, Roxanne Palmer created this fairly simple graphic to better explain how the performance took place.
Technically, Coachella Tupac wasn’t a hologram, but was a two-dimensional video projected on a screen that the audience couldn’t see. The image of Tupac wasn’t some kind of old footage of the rapper cut together in a convincing way, but was an animation, and was projected onto a mirrored surface, which reflected the animation back to a transparent screen which was set up in such a way that the audience could only see Tupac and not said screen.
As Max stated, the trick is based on Pepper’s Ghost, and it’s certainly amusing that such an old trick blew everyone’s minds in 2012, a world where we tell our phones with our voice to browse the Internet while we’re walking down the street, and they not only do just that, but provide an audible, voice response.
(via International Business Times, explanatory image via Roxanne Palmer)
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