Hatsune Miku's concerts used projection, then switched to LED

What you see

At a Miku Expo concert, audiences facing the stage watch an animated, moving figure of the virtual singer Hatsune Miku perform choreographed songs alongside a live backing band, a format Crypton Future Media's own site describes as 'Hatsune Miku's world concert tour presented by Crypton Future Media,' with events listed back to 2014. No headset is used; the character appears on a fixed display built into the stage, visible to the whole seated or standing crowd at once. Ticket listings for the tour, according to trade outlet Anime News Network, previously described the show as featuring a 'holographic' performance.

How it works

Anime News Network's report describes the concert format used for most of the tour's history as 'a transparent screen projection technique similar to Pepper's Ghost,' the same broad family of angled rear-projection illusion used for several other virtual-performer shows this site covers, rather than a laser-recorded optical hologram. Miku herself is entirely computer animation with no underlying photographed performer, driven by pre-rendered or real-time animation synced to a live band. For its North American 2024 tour, the same report says Crypton switched to conventional LED screen technology instead of the transparent projection screen previously used.

Viewing conditions and limits

Crypton's own site lists tour history back to 'HATSUNE MIKU EXPO 2014 in New York' and Los Angeles, and the Anime News Network report notes the 2024 North American tour marked the brand's 10th anniversary, its first North American run since 2018. That report states Crypton responded to fan complaints about the LED switch by saying attendees could 'continue to expect the same high-energy concert experience,' without committing to bring back the transparent screen. Neither source gives exact screen brightness or size figures for either technology.

What it is not

Despite ticket listings once calling the show 'holographic,' language Anime News Network reports Ticketmaster later removed, this is not a free-space or interference-recorded hologram: it is either a rear-projected animation on a transparent screen or, since 2024, an LED video display, both flat-format technologies rather than a volumetric image floating in open space. A Change.org petition described in the same report, seeking refunds after the 2024 change, treated the transparent-screen version as the more 'holographic'-looking of the two formats, which is a fan and marketing judgment about visual impression rather than an optical distinction between two genuinely different display categories. Both formats display the same underlying computer-animated character.

• Ask whether a concert billed as 'holographic' uses a transparent rear-projection screen, an LED panel, or another display, since both have been marketed with that word for this same show.
• Ask whether ticket or venue marketing describing a show as 'holographic' matches the producing company's own technical description.
• Ask how far back a touring virtual-performer show's history goes under its current display technology versus an earlier one, since the format can change between tours.

The 2024 format change, and the fan backlash Anime News Network documented, is a useful reminder that 'hologram' as applied to Miku concerts has described more than one distinct display technology over the format's history.