Japan's Latest Rock Star Is A 3D Hologram - Draws Huge Crowds

There's a good documentary on Hatsune Miku here - it's in Japanese but with English subtitles (click the 'CC' logo in the bottom right of the YouTube player to turn them on): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBZOlipfjkQ

I find the Hatsune Miku phenomenon somewhat amusing at the moment, given the trend of overt Autotuning in pop music - while virtual singers' voices are getting more realistic, real singers' voices are being manipulated to sound impossibly accurate and digital.

It's also an interesting study in image and marketing: Crypton really pushed the concept of associating a character with the voice, as if Vocaloids were virtual pop stars whose services you could buy, rather than just another virtual instrument.

Wow! This reminds me of the book Idoru by Willam Gibson.

Idoru on Wikipedia: "In the post Tokyo/San Francisco earthquake world of the early 21st century, Colin Laney is referred to agents of the aging mega-rock star Rez (of the musical group Lo/Rez, and seemingly very much styled after former The Smiths frontman, Morrissey) for a job using his peculiar talent of sifting through vast amounts of mundane data to find "nodal points" of particular relevance. Rez has claimed to want to marry a synthetic personality named Rei Toei, the Idoru (Japanese Idol) of the title, which is apparently impossible and therefore questioned by his loyal staff, particularly by his head of security, Blackwell.[...]" source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idoru

This looks more like rear-projection video (note the starburst in the back of the stage) or Pepper's Ghost, although the scrim is too vertically oriented to be that.

Nothing here looks 3D, but of course these videos are very carefully shot and enhanced from all appearances.

Is this really that different from Gorillaz? They are also cartoon personas that perform music.

If it gets to the point where an artificial intelligence composes and performs, then we will be in Gibson's Sprawl.

We can make computer controlled, real-time holographic displays now? That seems like bigger news than a rockstar.

Isn't that the holy grail of 3D displays?