The Strange Rise of Music Holograms | Hacker News Reader

The Strange Rise of Music Holograms

washingtonpost.com

40 pointswallflower25 comments

Interesting that this article doesn't mention Hatsune Miku, who of course does not exist except as a holographic virtual performer.

The article is about the ethical/philosophical implications of having dead performers holographically “brought to life,” so Hatsune Miku isn’t really relevant to the topic.

Probably because it's about "holograms" of dead performers performing "live" (as it were) and the ethics of the business of virtualizing those personas.

They're technically not holograms but Pepper's ghost.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper%27s_ghost

Calling them a hologram is like calling a lenticular a gif.

I mean, it depends. They're not always peppers ghost. It's quite common to just use transparent projector screens, as peppers ghost doesn't handle viewing angles all that well.

A hologram is a light field captured onto a film.

These live displays are usually just some sort of optical illusion.

A real hologram shows you the actual light from the captured event as it’s the entire light field from the event. So your eyes are receiving essentially stored light.

Right there with you friend, but unfortunately that's not how language works and there's no hard line as to what is and isn't a "hologram". Yes, you can coherently capture a real light wave field directly onto photo-material - you can also generate one synthetically, quantize your light field into spatial "hogels", eliminate an axis of parallax, constrict the FOV etc, and finally replace your interference-based "hogels" with lenses and you have an integral image or lenticular, which is different physics but exactly the same imaging principles. Every one of those stages is a "hologram" to some set of people - hardcore holographers might draw the line at analog techniques, researchers will accept anything interference-based, and laypeople will slap the label on just about anything that looks cool.

Believe me - this isn't a battle worth fighting. At the end of the day, everything is an illusion. Vision is not reality.

Source: many a long year making digital holograms and trying to explain to people what it is I do.

https://outline.com/WeZ93n

OT: but WP paywall is by far the most hostile of popular news org paywalls out there IMO. Using an addon like 1blocker is thwarted by virtue of the site redirecting to the homepage (although you can hide element screen a couple of times and view the entire article from within there).

I wonder if this strategy was pre or post Bezos purchase. Either way, I avoid WP at all costs. (I know clicking the ‘web’ link here can bypass - I’m just venting and I apologize for that).

Thanks for the outline link.

I don’t get it. I might watch something like this streamed. But live touring?

The main performer is not alive. What’s the draw? Is it like going to a wax museum but for music?

It seems as exciting as chewing on beeswax.

The first time I heard of this (and one of the examples in the article) was Snoop Dogg performing live at a festival, with a hologram of Tupac. Snoop was the draw, Tupac was a surprise, and it went over very well.

Also, "live concerts" with lip-synced performances seem to be relatively common, for whatever reasons. The audio is pre-recorded in this case, as well as with a solo, dead "live performer". Doesn't seem like a huge difference to me.

Community. Going some place to share in a communal experience with a large group of people is often more fun than doing the same activity by yourself or with a small group. It is the same reason people go to sports bars to watch sporting events when they could just watch it at home.

People find value in movie theaters even when the actual content is exactly the same as the DVD. People even get together to watch movies sometimes :)

Well, the Zappa one was good because the band was incredible and was put together specifically for this show, so it was the only chance to hear them. The bit with the Pepper's ghost were the least interesting really, though it was quite cleverly put together. The biggest problem was that from where I was sitting in the upper circle, you couldn't see his head!

I've never been to one, or really haven't even heard much of it until now, but I imagine it'd be quite the show. "Live" (heh) performances pull out more energy, more emotion, out of the audience. I can see how a well done hologram performance could be quite the entertaining experience.

I go to punk shows, so it's clearly different, but I don't know that I look at the stage during the concert at all. By the end of the show I know a bunch of people in the crowd but generally couldn't tell you what the bands looked like.

Sound system and mosh pit

There’s no point in using a hologram for steaming, you could just use CGI to overlay whatever you want.

The Roy Holorbison backup singers sounded so bad I thought they were intentionally trying to show what a bad idea this is.

I'm sorry, I don't usually do this, but this really pissed me off.

I don't use an adblocker. I am well aware that my web browsing experience would be much more pleasant if I did, but I want to support the sites I visit.

The Washington Post won't let me read their article because it says I need to disable my ad blocker, which I don't have. The link with instructions on how to disable my nonexistant ad blocker includes this line:

> Firefox's native ad blocker

> Select the "i" or shields icon to the left of the URL in the URL bar. In the tooltip that opens, click on "Turn off Blocking for This Site" to disable blocking. For more information, please visit Firefox's instructions.

Of course, Firefox doesn't have a native ad blocker. What these instructions are telling me to do is disable Firefox's "tracking protection". That's not the same at all.

It's about time for us to take back the web from advertising.

Back in the 90's and early 00's the web was an amazing place with high signal and low noise. Now you have shitty articles creeping into our social feeds that we can't even read -- they're effectively advertising on Hacker News, Reddit, etc. at no cost and then asking us to pay. That shouldn't fly.

News websites asking for money should get zero placement on social sites or news feeds.

These websites complain that we're depriving them of money, but the fact is they chose to build websites. They made a land grab during the commercialization of the internet and they're dissatisfied with the results.

Meanwhile we have auto-playing video ads because Google ad reps say it drives higher engagement, and the tech to support it is being built into Chrome because it earns Google more money.

Ugh.

Works fine if you disable all scripts. Enable washingtonpost.com to get the first image.

They say modern web ads are strongly coupled with tracking, you might as well treat them as synonyms.

If HN is to retain credibility, we need to ban posts linking to insidious and deceptive domains.

Credibility? Half the headlines are so vague they tell you you nothing about what the link is and the other half are atlas obscura nonsense or X written in Y and Doing This is BAD programming blogs.

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