How did the Tupac Coachella Hologram Work?

When Tupac took the stage posthumously at Coachella on Sunday, festival goers were dazzled by how realistic he looked. Quickly thereafter, YouTube videos of the Tupac hologram quickly began racking up hits online, and soon the rest of the world was able to share in the puzzlement: how on earth did they make the hologram look so real? Was that a recorded hologram from a previous performance at Coachella? Did Tupac really have such an intense set of abs?

Well, as it turns out, the Tupac 2012 performance was not a hologram at all, but rather an advanced CGI technology called Pepper’s Ghost. First demonstrated by John Henry Pepper in the 1860′s, the illusionary technique uses glass and mirrors to reflect light at perfect angles, which make a picture or moving image appear to be floating in 3D. {via Ars Technica}

It was the vision of Dr. Dre, who collaborated with two firms to make it happen: AV Concepts and Digital Domain.

Av Concepts, based out of San Diego, specializes in 3D “holographic” projections, and was the company that provided the lighting and effects system that put Tupac on stage.

(To view the technical aspects of the Tupac projection, see the firm’s website here.)

The three-dimensional Tupac we saw at Coachella was funded and envisioned by Dr. Dre, who paid somewhere between $100,000 and $400,000 for the effect.

The firm that actually created the image (yes, exaggerated abs) was called Digital Domain, according to MTV, and it’s the same firm that did CG images of Brad Pitt in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and Jeff Bridges in “Tron.” Dre apparently collaborated with the firm, making sure the rapper appeared as he would, all the way down to the Timberland boots and tattoos.

So, basically, Digital Domain made the computer-generated image and AV Concepts projected it on the stage.