3d hologram concerts, and supersoldiers

[spoonless]

Also, while I'm stealing links from crasch, Japan has way better rock concerts than we do...

A description of it, and a link to the "Vocaloidism" phenomenon it's based on:

http://singularityhub.com/2010/10/20/this-rocking-lead-singer-is-a-3d-hologram-video/

This strikes me as the future of rock and roll. I am wondering if any bands will bother to put live people out on the stage in a decade or two. Instead of selecting the best dancers with the most well proportioned bodies, we can just record music in the studio, and then use holograms to perform it for the audience. Another great leveling force that might enable a wider set of musicians to gain fame and acclaim.



In other news, CNN has a nice article on an IronMan-like suit being developed by Raytheon:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/innovation/11/11/iron.man.suit/index.html?eref=mrss_igoogle_cnn

It doesn't fly, but it amplifies your strength by about 17 times--they have a video of a man smashing through a board and doing push-ups in it. In the Iraq War, there were about 4000 US casualities compared to about 100,000 Iraqi casualities (this is only deaths, including wounded or injured as casualities gives much larger numbers). I wonder, if the US military got enough funding to issue suits like this to its ground troops, how much steeper would this ratio be? We could conceivably get to a point where we could go in on some mission and have 10 of our boys killed for every million killed of enemy soldiers and/or civilians. Kind of scary, but very poweful. Also at only $150k, it could be useful for construction or all kinds of other sorts of stuff.

From the CNN article: "One big obstacle, however, is how to power the suit." Well duh, they obviously didn't watch IronMan--you just need to replace your heart with a glowing bluish white orb.

Comments

[plymouth.livejournal.com]

I wonder if that was the inspiration for the Israel/Syria episode of Metalocalypse. (to summarize it: Deathklok accidentally gets double-booked in both countries and in order to avert starting WWIII they create two giant holograph stadiums in the two countries and play from a flating platform halfway in between the two).

[entomologist.livejournal.com]

Actually, one of the advantages of powered armor, if we could make it strong enough to resist anything that wouldn't kill, say, a tank, is that if used right it could reduce civilian casualties by allowing soldiers to get closer to the enemy, use less powerful offensive weapons, and be more discriminating in their choice of targets. Also, the R&D for powering such suits might just be where we finally get the funding to develop the Shipstone-style superbatteries we need to make electric cars truly competitive with the infernal combustion engine.

Of course, what will probably turn out to be easier than making it a suit with the operator inside is making a humanoid drone that the operator can control remotely -- a natural evolution of the Predator from aerial to ground-based weapon. The "suit" in the linked article really has more in common with the loader from Aliens than with anything from Iron Man or (the book) Starship Troopers, anyway.

[geheimnisnacht.livejournal.com]

I don't know about the rock concert idea. It works for the case you have where it seems the character is fictional, but would people actually pay much to see a hologram of their favorite band? Part of the experience is knowing you are in the presence of the actual band, as well as the changes/improvisation that a band can do live. Of course, the latter could be solved by a middle ground case where the band tele-commutes to the performance. :) That might be enough for most people, to at least know the band is at least playing live. In fact, it might catch on to have massive simul-concerts, where many venues across nations are showing the same holographic concert simultaneously.

This idea came up in a book I read, more or less, but in terms of a rave. Dozens of parties were going on simultaneously, and they rigged the walls to display what was going on in the "next party over", so you could visually interact with the neighboring parties: you could wave at the wall and see someone waving back.