Tupac at Coachella

Dr Dre and Snoop preformed at Coachella last night, and were joined onstage by Tupac recreated as a hologram. A lot of folk on social media were discussing the hologram this morning - it was a source of some amusement. Meanwhile, Tupac's murder remains unsolved.

Via Wired: "... Tupac, who was murdered in 1996, joined Dre and Snoop Dogg for three songs — “Gangsta Party,” “Hail Mary” and “Come With Me.” He hadn’t ever performed “Hail Mary” when he was alive. Nate Dogg, who died in 2011, also joined the pair for a time onstage alongside various living guests, including Eminem, Wiz Khalifa and 50 Cent..."

Via The Source Mag: "In an interview today with MTV, Tupac Shakur hologram curator Nick Smith of AV Concepts explained how it all went down. Below is two excerpts from the interview.

“We worked with Dr. Dre on this and it was Dre’s vision to bring this back to life,” said Nick Smith, president of AV Concepts, the San Diego company that created the hologram. “It was his idea from the very beginning and we worked with him and his camp to utilize the technology to make it come to life. You can take their likenesses and voice and … take people that haven’t done concerts before or perform music they haven’t sung and digitally recreate it.

"The Tupac hologram was several months in the planning and took nearly four months to create in a studio and though Smith was not able to reveal the exact price tag for the illusion, he said a comparable one could cost anywhere from $100,000 to more than $400,000 to pull off. “I can’t say how much that event cost, but I can say it’s affordable in the sense that if we had to bring entertainers around world and create concerts across the country, we could put [artists] in every venue in the country.”

ADDED: Russell Brown of Public Address notes that "It wasn't actually a true hologram, but an instance of Pepper's ghost, a reflection technique first presented to an audience in the 1860s, during a stage production of Charles Dickens' The Haunted Man. It's difficult to depict adequately in diagrams, but I've seen it in real life before and it works. (Indeed, I actually use a version of it every week when I read from a televsion autocue.)

...The other part -- the prior creation of the amazingly lifelike 3D image by AV Concepts and the company Digital Domain --seems to have invoved some mixture of archive concert footage, wire-frame animation and CGI. There was clearly some voice-acting: the late actor and rapper died in 1996, three years before the first Coachella festival, yet he hailed the crowd: "What the fuck up, Coachella?"

ADDED Tupac hologram helpfully explained by Taiwanese tv animators. Very funny. Watch for their suggestions of other stars due for reanimation, including Kurt Cobain.... Via Prefix Mag