Remember back when ‘hologram’ meant that if you moved the card back and forth, the image on it would wobble and change? It seemed like a more innocent time. Nobody suspected that holograms would one day be the headline in sold-out Japanese music concerts. In hindsight we totally should’ve seen that coming.

Hatsune Mikue is an apparently ‘realistic’ holographic singing idol, massively popular in Japan. ‘Sure,’ you might say to yourself, ‘I’m big in Japan too,’ to which I say shut up, that wasn’t funny when your dad said it thirty years ago either. A thing that isn’t real sold out a 25,000-person stadium. This is how the world ends – with hologram designed by a company called ‘Crypton Future Media,’ who made use of the popular Vocaloid software to put together visual and musical selections and then threw in some hologram technology just for kicks. And I’m not talking some barely-legible ‘help me, Obi-Wan, you’re my only hope,’ type hologram, I mean freakishly-proportioned-anime-character-in-the-flesh hologram.

Take a look above. I would warn you to put that sucker on mute because the sounds coming out of the holographic mouth make my ears want to punch me, except it’s important to understand that she could be telling those screaming fans to murder the disbelievers and they’d probably go for it. So feel free to add that to your list of things to fear.

[Thanks, Dom]