Getting ahead at the polls with the latest tech

In 2012, while Modi was preparing for his third and final election to govern the state of Gujarat, he started using the German-developed hologram systems to make phantom campaign visits to remote districts. Modi got himself into the Guinness Book of World Records with a visit to 53 towns simultaneously.

This may have been the first time hologram technology was used in a general election campaign. Modi used it to reach 5 million voters in the last two weeks of the Indian election that year.

Two years later, during his campaign for prime minister, Modi’s hologram campaign helped him address 1,400 rallies.

Modi and his campaign staff use “Pepper’s Ghost” technology. According to the BBC, one use of Pepper’s Ghost is to simply project imagery onto reflective glass in order to achieve the perception of a hologram (under the right viewing and lighting conditions). This is exactly what was done by Modi’s campaign during the 2012 and 2014 elections, allowing him to be “transported” to hundreds of locations simultaneously.

The company behind the hologram campaign is Musion, the same outfit that startlingly “resurrected” Tupac Shakur during a simulated concert at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in 2012.

The Musion website says the illusion requires 400 satellite dishes; 1,300 lights; 500 audio speakers; 200 sound mixers and power amps; and 14,000 meters of speaker and power cables to create the effect.

Elections in India are on a massive scale — 814 million people are eligible to vote, with an expected turnout of 70 percent. Politicians have over 1.2 million square miles to cover.

Hologram technology has other potential uses. In 1999, Washington Post journalist William Arkin wrote that the U.S. military had once considered using holographic technology to help to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Supposedly this would have been done by projecting large, three-dimensional objects that appeared to float in the air. This might have scared locals into hiding and demoralized the Iraqi military.

More recently, the French presidential campaign included several holographic rallies. French leftist candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon appeared to supporters by hologram during the 2017 election. Melenchon was speaking in person in the central city of Lyon, but he also appeared to 6,000 supporters in a concert hall 280 miles away in Paris.

How much longer until U.S. politicians start using this holographic technology? An American company called HologramUSA has the rights to use this technology here. Before long, there will be Republican and Democratic candidates strutting around several stages at once.

Some day, we might even see a resurrection of long-dead politicians from Ronald Reagan to John F. Kennedy sharing their former words of wisdom, all in the present moment. Wouldn’t that be something?