William GIbson's Idoru Has Arrived

I was out driving with the dog the other night, when a story on Public Radio International's excellent program "The World" caught my attention.

Hatsune Miku, a popular Japanese pop music singer, performed in front of a sold-out crowd last weekend at the the Nokia Theater in Los Angeles. The LA show was billed as the first stop on her "Mikunopolis" tour (although I'm having difficulty finding any listings for other concert dates). Last weekend's concert was part of the 2011 Anime Expo, and Expo head Marc Perez had a hand in organizing the show.

Here's the part of the story that caught my cyberpunk's attention: Hatsune Miku is not actually a person; she's a computer program. To be more accurate, she's a voice library application developed by Crypton Future Media for Vocaloid, a voice synthesizer program made by Yamaha.

She's sort of like the different voices you can select for your GPS's turn-by-turn directions mode - except younger, perkier, and with an implausible amount of turquoise hair. Yet the fact that Miku's not an actual flesh-and-blood person doesn't seem to faze her fans, some of whom drove for hours just to see a 3D hologram of her performing "live" on stage.


Dang, man. Every time I forget just how frighteningly prescient William Gibson's novels can be something like this happens. The last time was in the early 2000's, when augmented reality, which he first wrote about in his 1994 novel Virtual Light became the hot new thing.

Now it seems that Rei Toei, the holographic pop star from Gibson's 1996 novel Idoru has come to life in the person of Hatsune Miku. (Idoru is the follow-up novel to Virtual Light, and the second book of his so-called "Bridge Trilogy.") I can only hope that, like Rei, Miku will go on to build a legion of tween girl followers, marry someone who sort of reminds us of Bono, and have all sorts of crazy adventures.


In the meantime, technology, I'm still waiting for my mirrorshade implants and Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7 deck. Oh, and a cure for AIDS would be nice, too. (Oh, wait, it looks like you're on that one already.)