• Two other U.S. companies at the forefront of the nascent holographic-entertainment industry, Hologram USA and Pulse Evolution, currently hold the rights to bring the likes of Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Billie Holiday and Selena back to life as they see fit. If it’s proven that money can be made from these early holo-tours, we will soon be inundated. A virtual zombie army of dead entertainers will be upon us.

Indeed, what used to be a one-off novelty — hologram Tupac playing Coachella in 2012! hologram Michael Jackson performing at the 2014 Billboard Music Awards! — risks becoming the norm for touring shows.

Tupac Shakur was something of a trendsetter. A hologram of the deceased rapper performed at the 2012 Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival. (CHRISTOPHER POLK / GETTY IMAGES)

Obviously, the prospect is attractive to anyone who has a stake in exploiting a deceased artist’s legacy. Their “estates” — usually presided over by family members like Mitch Winehouse or Alex Orbison, who’s been a tireless champion of BASE Hologram’s efforts to bring his dad’s music to a new audience — can theoretically watch the licensing cheques roll in until the end of time. Once the 28-date Roy Orbison hologram tour wraps, for instance, it’s for “the first-ever hologram residency” in Branson, Mo., a town that, ironically, was once lampooned in The Simpsons as an entertainment destination populated predominantly by entertainers thought to be dead.

Meantime, record labels have a new way of monetizing their catalogues at a time when ever fewer people are buying records and promoters are guaranteed headliners who will show up and get the job done on clockwork time without complaining about the catering or chucking a whiskey bottle at anyone backstage, presumably at a fraction of the cost required to bring in human performers, to boot.

It’s not much of a leap to imagine a future moment where we can all beam a holographic performance by Elvis or Michael Jackson or David Bowie into our living rooms, picking and choosing the exact era of their careers we’d prefer to be represented. Farther down the road we might be able to implant memories of seeing Pink Floyd live at Pompeii like the virtual vacationers in Philip K. Dick’s “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale.”

Is that a good thing? While I’ve found the whole dead-celeb hologram thing immensely creepy since a crude likeness of Tupac Shakur turned up to perform with Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre at the Coachella festival in 2012, I will concede that watching a really well-done hologram of Roy Orbison perform “Crying” in front of a troupe of living musicians could be really neat. And the rise of hologram artists like Hatsune Miku and Lil Miquela who don’t actually exist in human form at all does seem to herald the medium’s future possibilities as an art form unto itself, an art form that might stand on a foundation more solid than the novelty value of seeing dead singers (or ABBA) reanimated onstage.

Part of me, too, is tempted to view the embrace of holographic entertainment as a subconscious cultural acknowledgement of our place in a reality that such bold thinkers as theoretical physicist David Bohm and neurophysiologist Karl Pribram have posited is actually holographic in nature. It’s a complicated subject — Michael Talbot’s thoughtful 1991 classic The Holographic Universe is a good place to start — but there has lately been some mathematical evidence to support some of these concepts. There’s a head-spinning amount of jargon such as “black branes,” “boundary worlds” and “Anti-de Sitter five-space times the five sphere” involved in the reasoning, but string theorist Juan Maldacena’s calculations have led him to believe, as Brian Greene notes in The Hidden Reality, that “string theory within the bulk of this space-time shape is identical to a quantum field theory living on its boundary” — or, in other words, that our reality could be a holographic projection onto a surface of another reality that is indistinguishable from that reality in every way.

Yes, we could now be thrilling to the act of watching holograms perform “live” for us inside what is, in effect, a giant hologram. Suddenly the idea of someone cloning Ian Curtis for the stage a few years from now doesn’t seem all that far-fetched.

Ben Rayner is the Star’s music critic and based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @ihateBenRayner

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