This falls into the category of jaw-dropping ‘trend watch’. Heard of Coachella? It’s a music and arts festival held in Indio, CA that crosses many genres – rock, indie, hip hop and electronic – and has a reputation for pushing boundaries and trying new things. On Sunday night, it set the crowds and the Twittersphere alight.

To the 100,000 in the audience, it appeared as though dead rapper, Tupac Shakur, was performing on stage. How? Though the magic of hologram. It was quite a resurrection.

It looks amazing, if a little bit video game-ish. You can watch it below – with a language warning.

Several companies were part of the resurrection including AV Concepts, a San Diego-based company and Digital Domain that made computer generated images of Brad Pitt in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” amongst others. A video was composed by New York company MPC using a mixture of live footage, wire-framing, and CGI. This was fed into 3-D hologram company Musion’s holographic technology, which projects the image onto a special foil. The foil is based on principles set out in the old magician’s illusion Pepper’s Ghost that tricks audiences into thinking they’re viewing a person or object rather than a reflection.

The Tupac hologram took four months to create and cost somewhere between $100,000 and $400,000 or more. If you charge $100 a ticket, it might be cheaper to put on a hologram concert than pay live artists. As one commentator noted, if the estates of dead artists need some extra funds, hologram performances could be the ideal option. Imagine Michael Jackson, Freddie Mercury, Kurt Cobain or Jimi Hendrix back in 3D form on stage. And I bet sales of Tupac’s music went up after his Coachella projection.

So, could holograms of managing directors be beamed into your workplace? Could a new product be demonstrated through hologram? It might be a bit expensive to do right now, but we know what happens to the price of new technology once it’s accepted.

Freaky? Or the future? Or both?

http://youtu.be/l9yFYmboERs