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Michael Jackson performance was ‘not a hologram’

Michael Jackson's hologram at the Billboard Music Awards was actually an old magician's trick known as "Pepper's Ghost."

2014-05-22_1021Strictly speaking Michael Jackson’s ‘performance’ at the Billboard Music Awards was not the hologram it was purported to be.

The imagery of Jackson was actually created with an old magician’s trick using a mirror, a 2D effect known as “Pepper’s Ghost.”

“[While Jackson] was a Pepper’s Ghost effect, we are looking at ways to make [these experiences] more realistic and interactive,” USC compsci research professor Paul Debevec tells the Hollywood Reporter.

“I see it actually becoming three-dimensional and also interactive so that the performers are responding to the audience — almost puppeteered through motion capture while we start to build artificial intelligence into these performances. That’s pretty far off, but I think that’s where it needs to head.”

For all the hologram excitement, everybody has probably forgotten Laurence Olivier’s nightly performance as a hologram in the 1986 West End musical Time.

One Response

  1. Except Olivier’s appearance was also not a hologram but previously shot footage of him projected onto a glass screen.

    The trick with later “hologram” performances from the likes of Elvis Presley (with Celine Dion) and Tupac Shakur (with Snoop Dogg) is that the images were created using CGI and featured the singers doing things that they hadn’t done when alive.

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