ILM calls its Rogue One Tarkin a computer graphics recreation

What you see

In cinemas and on streaming, viewers of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story see a digitally recreated likeness of Grand Moff Tarkin, originally played by Peter Cushing, appearing within ordinary two-dimensional film footage. There is no headset, no free-space image, and no live venue; the character exists only as pixels finished into the movie's frames, identical for every viewer in every screening. Industrial Light & Magic's own project page for the film describes the studio's task as producing "photoreal digital recreations of actors Peter Cushing, reprising his role as Grand Moff Tarkin in a substantial way, and Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia" — language naming a rendered digital character, not a physical or optical projection.

How it works

ILM visual effects supervisor John Knoll, in an interview published on ILM's own site, explains the reasoning plainly: "Tarkin and Leia are so iconic, that you couldn't do that with them. If they're going to show up, you'd have to really match their likeness, and the only way to do that is with computer graphics." That describes a rendered, pre-composited character — built, textured, lit, and animated inside a computer over months of production — rather than anything captured live or projected in real time. The cited pages skip pipeline detail, but the studio's own framing is unambiguous about the category: computer graphics composited into film, not an optical trick performed live before an audience.

Viewing conditions and limits

Because the character is finished, rendered footage rather than a live display, there is no viewing angle, brightness, or headset requirement: every audience member in every theater or on every screen sees the identical, fixed result rendered during post-production. This is itself a meaningful limit — the performance cannot be relit or viewed from an angle the filmmakers did not render, unlike a stage hologram or light-field display, which respond to where and when a person is standing.

What it is not

Press shorthand sometimes calls a digitally recreated actor a "hologram," but ILM's own description of the Tarkin work names computer graphics composited into a two-dimensional frame, not any optical mechanism covered elsewhere in this archive. It is not an interference-recorded hologram, since no light wavefront was recorded or reconstructed. It is not a Pepper's-ghost stage illusion either, since nothing was projected live before a venue audience; the character was finished before the film was screened. The closest honest label, and the one ILM's own team uses, is visual effects: a rendered digital double, the same category of technique used for entirely fictional creatures in the same film.

• Was the effect finished and rendered before the audience saw it, or produced live in a room?
• Does the description involve a camera and a screen, or a projection and a physical stage?
• Does the studio's own language name a rendering and compositing process, or an optical apparatus?

Calling a well-executed digital double a "hologram" flatters it with the wrong vocabulary. ILM's own account of the Tarkin recreation is more specific, and more impressive: a photoreal computer-graphics character matched to an iconic likeness and composited seamlessly into a finished film.