Hologram

The late Tupac Shakur rose again last weekend at Coachella -- brought to life by James Cameron's visual production house Digital Domain, and two hologram-imaging companies, AV Concepts and the U.K.-based Musion Systems. The capacity crowd reportedly went silent with shock when Shakur appeared to rise from the stage, shout a profanity filled version of "What's up Coachella?" and then joined headliners Snoop Dog and Dr. Dre for two songs. But that shock value will only last so long as holographic images are poised to increasingly feature in mainstream music performances.

A Hologram for the King A Novel Dave Eggers McSweeney's: 328 pp., $25 More than any other writer of his generation, Dave Eggers is a brand. The 42-year-old author is accomplished in many fields - he's the founder of McSweeney's, a successful independent publishing house and innovative literary journal that grew out of a still-vital humor website. He's the head of the multi-city literacy nonprofit 826, which is partly supported by whimsical storefronts like the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Store.

This post has been corrected. Please see note at bottom for details. Just a few months after wowing Coachella Valley Music Festival audiences with a virtual Tupac Shakur, visual effects company Digital Domain Media Group has announced plans to bring Elvis Presley back to life virtually. Actually, make that Elvis Presleys -- plural. "We are looking to develop several versions of Elvis," said Ed Ulbrich, chief creative officer at Digital Domain, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.

 Starring in beloved indie films may be good for Bill Murray's legacy, but it doesn't pay well enough to maintain his high-flying lifestyle -- or at least that's what the "Moonrise Kingdom" star told David Letterman Thursday on "The Late Show. " "I've been doing these art films and it's killing me financially," he complained. "I tip heavy, I dress like a king. The numbers just spiral. " His solution? Inspired by the Tupac Shakur hologram that "performed" at the Coachella  music festival  in April, Murray claimed he plans to send a virtual version of himself to music festivals and 20,000-seat venues around the country.

A Hologram for the King A Novel Dave Eggers McSweeney's: 328 pp., $25 More than any other writer of his generation, Dave Eggers is a brand. The 42-year-old author is accomplished in many fields - he's the founder of McSweeney's, a successful independent publishing house and innovative literary journal that grew out of a still-vital humor website. He's the head of the multi-city literacy nonprofit 826, which is partly supported by whimsical storefronts like the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Store.

Ask anyone who attended both weekends of the 2012 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival what the big difference was between the events, and you'll likely end up talking about the weather. The festival, which kicked off April 13 and featured 140-plus artists, expanded from one weekend to two this year for the first time in its 13-year history. Although the lineup of artists - from the Black Keys to Radiohead to Snoop Dogg andDr. Dre - was identical each weekend, the same could not be said of the weather.

From photography, you get photographs. From holography, you get holo grams. Don't expect logic from science. I knew what holograms looked like, from museum shows. They looked like ghostly apparitions in thin air--pallid faces, three-dimensional and true to life down to the last hair; locomotives that charged out of frames; telescopes with eyepieces, fabricated only of light, that jutted 13 inches out of walls. They seemed miraculous and slightly scary.

I certainly enjoyed the July 15 cover story on "Quantum Leap." Being a sci-fi fan, this show immediately was appealing to me. It has mystery, romance, science fiction and humor. The latter is provided by the interaction between Sam (Scott Bakula) and Al (Dean Stockwell). I am glad the series was renewed and will be presented on Friday (at 8 p.m.). Now if its time slot could be at 9 p.m., that would be even better. But it doesn't matter; I watched the series every night it aired during "Quantum Leap" week.

Set among Lido Marina Village's covey of sailboat shops, restaurants and clothing stores, Southern California's only hologram gallery might be mistaken for an optical illusion. Newport Holograms, with its three-dimensional watches winking enticingly from behind the display windows, catches the curious eye. But once inside the dark shop, one may become uneasy. Walls lined with 3-D laser reproductions pulse with an eerie greenish glow.

For the second time in a week, thieves broke into a Santa Monica exhibit of holograms on Sunday, ripping 17 of the art pieces from walls or cutting the wires that attached them to the ceiling. "I just don't know what to do," said J. William McGowan, chairman of the board of Associates of Science and Technology, coordinator of the "Images in Time and Space" exhibit. "I'm past the point of being able to speak coherently." Santa Monica police said there was no sign of forced entry.

This post has been corrected. Please see note at bottom for details. Just a few months after wowing Coachella Valley Music Festival audiences with a virtual Tupac Shakur, visual effects company Digital Domain Media Group has announced plans to bring Elvis Presley back to life virtually. Actually, make that Elvis Presleys -- plural. "We are looking to develop several versions of Elvis," said Ed Ulbrich, chief creative officer at Digital Domain, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.

Ask anyone who attended both weekends of the 2012 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival what the big difference was between the events, and you'll likely end up talking about the weather. The festival, which kicked off April 13 and featured 140-plus artists, expanded from one weekend to two this year for the first time in its 13-year history. Although the lineup of artists - from the Black Keys to Radiohead to Snoop Dogg andDr. Dre - was identical each weekend, the same could not be said of the weather.

The late Tupac Shakur rose again last weekend at Coachella -- brought to life by James Cameron's visual production house Digital Domain, and two hologram-imaging companies, AV Concepts and the U.K.-based Musion Systems. The capacity crowd reportedly went silent with shock when Shakur appeared to rise from the stage, shout a profanity filled version of "What's up Coachella?" and then joined headliners Snoop Dog and Dr. Dre for two songs. But that shock value will only last so long as holographic images are poised to increasingly feature in mainstream music performances.

Of all the predictions made during the future-happy 1950s -- when it was declared we'd soon have flying cars, robot butlers, rocket-delivered mail and food made from wood pulp -- there was one forward-looking statement that was completely validated. It was delivered by Criswell, a self-described soothsayer and TV personality, who said, "We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives." Otherwise, predicting the future, certainly in the realm of technology, is a risky endeavor.

Stephen A. Benton, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who invented the rainbow-colored 3-D holograms widely used on credit cards and driver's licenses to thwart counterfeiters, has died. He was 61. Benton, who directed the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies and was a founding member of MIT's Media Laboratory, died Sunday of brain cancer at Massachusetts General Hospital.

During his heyday as a teen heartthrob four decades ago, actor-singer James Darren scored five top-10 singles, including "Her Royal Majesty" and the Grammy-nominated "Goodbye Cruel World." Darren, who soared to stardom playing Moondoggie opposite Sandra Dee in "Gidget" in 1959, also recorded 12 albums and performed on everything from "American Bandstand" to "The Ed Sullivan Show."

Polaroid Corp. has announced a new service to help customers create and mass produce holograms, two-dimensional images that appear three-dimensional by the use of light. The service will allow magazines and others to reproduce high-quality embossed holograms up to 10 inches by 18 inches using a process that Polaroid developed over the past year, the company said in a recent news release.

For two decades, Stanford University physicist Leonard Susskind battled cosmologist Stephen Hawking over the behavior of black holes. Hawking said that when black holes eat their fill, they disappear, taking with them everything they consumed over their billions of years of existence. Susskind found this idea so disturbing that he publicly declared war -- a conflict he describes in his new book, "The Black Hole War."

The closest physics has ever come to producing a bona fide ghost is probably the hologram, that eerily unreal object made entirely of light. Floating in space with no visible means of support, a holographic star ship can hover, a disembodied holographic face can turn to follow you, a holographic hand can wave in greeting. Yet reach out to touch it, and it melts away like a cloud. Once the exotica of science museums, holograms are now everyday objects, adorning books, credit cards, toys.

Andres Hernandez, 11, a Rio Lindo Elementary School student, visited a museum exhibit at Santa Paula Oil Museum this month that he loves to talk about. "I really think kids should go," he said enthusiastically. Especially, he added, because his favorite object in the show, a microscope, "wasn't really there." No, Andres isn't confused. He's a serious person who is quick to tell you, "I like science."