Hey man, did you hear the new iPhone's gonna
have a holographic display?
Hey man, bull----.
[the modulated rogue] "The modern rogue makes pepper's ghost."
So they use this effect at the Haunted Mansion at Disney?
Yeah, dude! It's the highlight of the ride.
You've got this giant table, you've got a whole bunch of ghosts
chasing tail. Yes, it's exactly what it sounds like.
Everybody thinks it's highfalutin projectors or lasers or something
turns out it's a really bright light shining on statues
moving around underneath you.
Huh! Okay, and they call it Pepper's ghost. Why do they call it Pepper's ghost?
Because John Henry Pepper popularized it in the eighteen hundreds, but it was developed
by Giambattista della Porta in the sixteen hundreds.
So how does it work?
The same way they brought back Tupac from the dead as a hologram.
>> Jason: At Coachella?
>> Brian: Yeah!
All you need is a transparent surface at a fourty-five degree angle
and some kind of brightly lit version of whatever it is you're trying to show.
Now in the Haunted Mansion, it's actual statues that are brightly lit underneath you
and the reflections are what you see, in what appears to be that 3D space, but for what we're doing
we're going to take a 2D picture, and reflect it to make it look like it's hovering in 3D space.
Two questions. Can we do it ourselves?
And how cheap is it?
Of course, yes. And dirt freaking cheap
as long as you remember what a compact disc was.
>> Jason: Compact disc? >> Brian: C-uh--CD.
Uh, precursor to the DVD, they came in jewel cases.
All that matters is that we've got some clear plastic.
That's all we need.
We're going to make, like, a reverse-pyramid
that's going to sit up like a little rose.
and hopefully reflect four different images in four different directions
It should look like a hologram.
Now if we just wanted a tetrahedron with three sides on the top,
we would do fourty-five, fourty-five, ninety (degree) triangles.
But we need equilateral triangles that are sixty, sixty, sixty, right?
So this is just over six centimeters wide.
So basically what I'm doing is I measured it at six and a half centimeters.
>> Brian: There we go!
>> Brian: So if we get four of these, we should be totally good.
Okay, watch your fingers.
>> Brian: Yeah, see when you push hard you get those cracks in there.
>> Jason: Oh, right.
>> Brian: And you can just keep scoring the same spot over and over again.
Go for it.
>> Brian: Okay, let's see if we can kind of crack these along those lines.
>> Brian: Hey! There we go!
>> Brian: Look at that!
>> Jason: Okay, and we need four of these? These are going to be our facets.
>> Brian: Yeah, correct.
All right!
So theoretically, let's take these four parts.
We have my horribly broken-ass one.
You know the funny part is, we actually do want to cut off the top of it, so I think we might be all right.
Yeah, so here's what we're going to do: we're going to line this up here, we're going to
score it with seven of these forward. [referring to the grid squares he's using to measure]
So if we did our job right, we have four surfaces
each of which is going to reflect one of four images
but if you look at it from side-on, it should look like stuff's floating?
>> Brian: Does that sound right? >> Jason: Yeah!
How did they make it back in the nineteenth century before these *jewel* cases?
They would use actual glass as far as I know!
And in fact, if I heard correctly, the Tupac one was actually a thin sheet of plastic
that was just tilted at a fourty-five -- >> Jason: Just like Saran wrap?
Yeah yeah yeah, basically.
All right, here you start assembling these.
>> Brian: I don't want to get fingerprints on it.
>> Jason: Yeah, and occlude the image.
>> Brian: So here, we'll do this.
>> Brian: All right, all right!
>> Brian: So look at this, you can see that sixty degrees would theoretically be a hexagon
but instead we make it a 3D pyramid.
>> Jason: I think that's gonna work! >> Brian: You think it will?!
>> Jason: I think it's gonna work. >> Brian: I don't know, man.
This is a fairly low-fidelity... prism?
>> Brian: Holographic [trails off] >> Jason: Yeah, I don't know what to call that.
All I care about is: does it work?
>> Brian: All right, theoretically--
>> Brian: Holy cow!
>> Jason: What!?
>> Jason: Wow! >> Brian: Right?
>> Jason: That looks way better than I anticipated. >> Brian: Right?!
>> Brian: It's just a floating jellyfish!
- Okay, I knew this was going to look good, but I didn't know it was going to look incredible.
>> Brian: I didn't even think it would look good. [laughs] I thought it was going to look terrible.
>> Brian: Well and that's with my crappy tape job on there.
Dude, that looks awesome. That flame!
>> Brian: Dude I gotta show the kids.
>> Jason: Oh this is going to blow their mind, this is blowing my mind!
>> Brian: It really does look like it's hovering right there in the middle.
>> Jason: The only flaws to the image-
>> Brian: -are my fault.
>> Jason: I mean, our fault.
>> Brian: I'm calling it. This is the best investment of old jewel cases and twenty minutes of time I've ever made.
>> Jason: Yes... henceforth, all episodes of the Modern Rogue will be presented in Pepper's Ghost Vision.
[laughter]
>> Brian: We've just got to quadruple our camera budget.