Review: Japanese hologram pop star Hatsune Miku tours North America

SEATTLE—"Do you think ten-year-old you would believe that a concert like this could ever exist?"

My buddy asked me this after we'd spent two hours laughing at the weirdest concert we'd ever attended: Hatsune Miku Expo 2016. The concert's distinguishing feature was a massive, see-through screen in front of a rock band, on which singing, 10-foot-tall anime princesses were projected. Forget Britney, Miley, or Taylor: no pop star fits the "larger than life" bill quite like a hologram singer who packs stadiums and can change costumes with a single hard-drive swap. The snark possibilities were rich.

As we walked out of the concert, however, snark gave way to giddy delight. We had finally seen Miku in the "flesh." Its creators and backing band rarely play in Miku's homeland of Japan, let alone elsewhere, forcing the curious to watch one of a scant few YouTube videos to see what the heck this show is all about. North Americans have nine more opportunities this year, including this coming Saturday in San Francisco, thanks to a continent-spanning tour. I caught the tour's opening night in Seattle last Saturday, fully prepared to chide it.

On my way out of the venue, however, I found myself reflecting on the impressive tech and the entertaining show. I couldn't help but close my eyes, smile, and answer my friend: "10-year-old me is flipping out right now."

A new breed of manufactured pop star

To understand Miku's rise, it helps to look at the nation "she" came from. If you think pop music is phony and manufactured in the United States, you ain't seen nothing.

Japan and Korea's most famous pop and rock acts are run through an incredible mill and are considered wholly disposable. You can go down quite the Internet rabbit hole looking up some serious horror stories from both nations. (Should you want to take the dive, start here.) It only makes sense that music-producing companies would look for an even easier path to control a pop star's career and image. They got their chance in the early '00s thanks to the rise of "vocaloids," or banks of vocal samples that combine real voices, computer modulation, and synthesized speech. The term vocaloid went on to describe any personification of these singing voices, and Hatsune Miku is arguably the most famous of these.

That's not because Miku was the first of these to appear in the world of Japanese pop music, complete with a stylized cartoon representation, but because she was the first vocaloid to appear in concert. The character's public debut came at a Japanese festival in 2009, when she appeared in hologram form—on a projected screen next to a band—for a single song. (This performance predated the infamous hologram Tupac by a full three years.)

Fast forward a few years, and Miku is a full-blown J-Rock sensation, complete with comics, video games, and a gang of "friends" with different synthesized voices. More importantly, they each have their own dominant colors.

You didn’t bring your own glowstick?!

Color differentiation was very important at Hatsune Miku Expo 2016. Upon entering the venue, every concertgoer was handed a free, small glowstick, tuned to the blue-green hue that smothers Miku's default character design, including her long, thick ponytails and her short, Avril Lavigne-like necktie. But Miku's superfans furrowed their costumed brows at the free glowsticks because they brought their own.

Modern J-pop and K-pop concert crowds are full of glowsticks. Fans use them to express preference or adoration for particular bands, who each tend to be assigned a specific color. (A February episode of Radiolab dug into this phenomenon in Korea, complete with a bizarre anecdote about a pop act being punished by fans with a concert "blackout" by glowstick holders.) Miku's biggest fans show up with wands that can change color with the tap of a button or slider. Colors aren't just generic red-green-yellow; they're specifically tuned to the different characters' shades, pretty much to Pantone specifications.

Most of the concert included heavy glowstick use, meaning the nearly capacity crowd at Seattle's Wamu Theater pumped and waved their glowing hands in semi-synchronized fashion for nearly two hours. And, yes, let me repeat: A hologram projection of a pop star easily packed over 4,000 seats, and many of those were taken by people dressed in elaborate costumes, either in one of Miku's outfits, as one of Miku's friends, or as whatever anime character the concertgoer pleased.

The Miku character had the whole crowd beat, of course, with no less than nine costumes appearing on her polygonally rendered body throughout the evening. The concert began with Miku's live band—guitar, bass, keyboards, and drums—going on a J-Rock instrumental tear as the massive, see-through projection screen lit up with Tron-like laser-line animations and a phony computer-analysis breakdown of all of the anime pop stars we would eventually see: red lady, pink lady, blue guy, yellow twins. Lastly, there was Miku, and there were screams. Screams.

Miku then appeared in a flash of light as her full body was slowly rendered from bottom to top, and she wasted no time playing one of her more popular songs, "World Is Mine" (it's typically the first result in a random Miku search engine query). I was immediately blown away, at least visually. The concert's incredibly wide projection screen offered a clean, realistic-looking view of Miku from every angle I tried at the venue. Of course, no seat at the Wamu Theater let me see an illusion-breaking side angle, but wherever I stood, it looked like a 3D, computer-generated anime diva had really come to life.

Helping matters was some killer rendering work in terms of lighting and animation. Miku has a ton of long, blue-green hair, and while its animation and physics-powered bouncing off of clothing was damned impressive, the more important immersion factor came from a lighting system that made it look like whatever was up there, real or fake, really existed and was being smothered in house lights. Virtual microphone stands and virtual musical instruments were cast by the same lighting model, and the effect never failed to impress me throughout the evening.

Plus, all of the CGI characters were running at some insane projection refresh: nothing less than 120 frames per second. You can watch all of the Hatsune Miku videos on YouTube you want, but their 30 or 60 FPS refresh doesn't come close to selling what it's like to see this incredibly rendered vocaloid in the same room.

Yet these impressions were constantly marred by the Miku rig's major failing: a lack of depth. Miku and friends spent pretty much the entire concert dancing, but since the projection is cast onto a single, wide screen, there's no way to render realistic-looking steps forward or backward. Watch any dance sequence from a filmed concert and you won't have to count longer than three before you see someone step forward or backward. It's a natural dance expectation that Miku cannot fulfill. As a result, the dance moves on show became weirder and weirder as the night went on, and jazz hands and twirls dominated the CGI choreography.

There was also a strange mix of visually underwhelming sequences and holy-cow digital effects. At first, I thought that perhaps Miku's team wanted to reinforce the "realistic" aspect of the hologram—as in, this person looks like she's really there, so let's not ruin the illusion with wacky anime-inspired digital effects. But then there were visual highlights like the gang's yellow twins dancing next to flashing broken English, or when Miku turned into a floating goth queen complete with giant, white wings. Those moments looked so striking that I had to ask: Why not crank the visual craziness up on every song?

So much GIF fodder in the crowd

Mind you, the team behind Hatsune Miku shot down every single press request we sent to hang out back stage, get a closer look at the projection tech, or even respond to questions about how everything at the concerts is rendered and projected. In fact, each press query was initially answered with an excited "yes" only to be turned back with a reluctant "no," as if the company's handlers are afraid to give away any proprietary solutions (or cheap visual illusions). Therefore, my ability to answer exactly how Miku looked so good is limited.

I couldn't tell if the production team pulled off any technical feats beyond the old Pepper's Ghost photo-illusion trick. The field of view was wide enough to support up to five characters side-by-side simultaneously along with some screen-filling digital illusions. But that may have simply come from a mirror reflection of a high-framerate computer system. Still, the projection at the Mitsune Expo held up to visual scrutiny, with the exception of 2-3 animation hitches due to characters trying to walk forward and backward.

The rest of the show came down to subjective opinion. If you're not a J-Rock or anime fan, Hatsune's impressive tech probably isn't going to convert you. Miku and her gang of friends share some alarmingly disproportionate body types, which only look weirder in the form of these realistic-seeming projections, and each CGI-woman's outfit seemed like it was designed to get as close as humanly possible to giving viewers an underskirt peek. (They all wore skirts, or equally revealing, short-cut dresses.) The outfits on display were made up of colorful and inventive designs that would look ridiculous on a real person, but they somehow looked cool on Miku and co.

As for the music, Miku traffics in perfectly catchy and repetitive J-Rock, which I saw more than a few stoked fans sing along to word-for-word. The weirdest moments came when a given vocaloid began singing in ways that would be impossible for a human, ranging from Uzi-like blasts of rapid syllables to digitally augmented, super-high notes. These sounded inhuman and jarring enough on their own, but they were made worse by being matched to a character barely moving her mouth or jaw in kind—as if someone had slapped a Teddy Ruxpin cassette tape into Miku's belly.

There was also the matter of a crowd of awkward-looking super-fans pumping their glowsticks out of rhythm with the music while wearing slack-jawed, dead-faced expressions. Had I snapped video of the dozen or so people I'd seen doing that in my section of the theater, I imagine I'd have devastating GIF fodder for years to come. More than a few times, I felt like I had been transported to a terrifying, sci-fi dystopia in which citizens had gathered to pay respects to their robotic overlords, and the old rock-concert man in me nearly began shouting about "back in my day" and how "real" bands and grungy nightclubs are better and yadda yadda yadda.

Then I calmed down. Hatsune Miku is clearly a different kind of concert experience, one that exemplifies the best and worst of dehumanized, manufactured pop stars. In its coolest moments, the concert I saw pulled off elements of costume design, dance, singing, and technology that may never be topped by a normal band or pop act. As such, I absolutely recommend checking the Miku Expo out should it come anywhere near your town, at the very least for the curiosity factor. Just be ready to feel underdressed in the glowstick department.

Listing image by Muraki Kanae