Modern CGI combined with centuries old optical tricks in a historic performance from rapper Tupac Shakur this week at the Coachella music festival.

The performance, first heralded as a display of holographic ingenuity turned out to be just a really cool optical illusion combined with computer graphics.

Fans of magic and rap were delighted when the dead MC took the stage with still living friends Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg to perform two songs. The performance, being referred to as a three dimensional hologram, is actually just an update of a 19^th century magic trick.

Using an optical illusion known as "Pepper's Ghost" the dead famous rapper was able to rock the stage at the California music festival.

As explained by MTV's James Montgomery, the image was in fact a two-dimensional projection which used a series or mirrors and screens to render the 3D effect.

"There's an overhead projector that sort of reflects down onto basically a tilted piece of glass that's sort of on the stage floor," said Mongomery. "That then reflects the reflection onto a Mylar sort of screen, and it projects in this sort of 3D kind of thing where it allows the other performers to sort of walk in front of Tupac and basically interact [with] him."

British chemist John Pepper adapted the trick with fellow Brit Henry Dirks for use in 19^th century theater acts.

The mixture of classic magical trickery allowed for a CG Tupac to perform his hit songs "2 Of Amerikaz Most Wanted" and "Hail Mary". While the illusion dates back to the 1860s it has since been adapted for use at theme parks, museums, and now concerts.

The ghostly performance was the result of four months of collaboration between Dr. Dre’s production company, James Cameron’s Digital Domain, and two hologram-imaging companies, AV Concepts and UK-based Musion Systems.

While the exact methods of the performance have been kept under raps by all parties involved, the trick does mark an interesting step for the technology.

Some have speculated that the technology could be expanded to include entire sets and revues from artists and bands which have long since departed.

That prospect should excite music lovers hoping to catch John Lennon live at the Royal Albert Hall. Or get a glimpse of Jimmy Hendrix in Madison Square Garden. No word yet on any impeding Buddy Holly tour.

Like most of the technology world, V3 was eager to get its hands on a copy of Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs and, thanks to the nifty powers of Amazon's Kindle system, we've been enjoying the biography since yesterday afternoon.

The opening chapters provide a swift but thorough overview of Jobs' early life as he discovers that he was adopted, meets tech whiz Steve Wozniak, and eventually founds Apple, all while accidentally getting his on/off girlfriend pregnant and doing a lot of acid.

Jobs' voice comes through little but often in the opening chapters, Isaacson instead setting the scene and using information from those who knew him at the time to paint the background of his life, with hints at how these formative years would shape the success of Apple.

This involved Jobs' fascination with Buddhism that fed his desire for clean, intuitive technologies, to the ethos instilled in him by his father of ensuring that each and every component of a product is designed with love and care.

What also comes through a lot in the early chapters is just how pivotal Wozniak was to the early success of Apple, and how well the two Steves worked together. Woz's enduring love for HP for its research philosophy also shines through, something he told V3 about last week.

Yet the book is about Jobs and from the opening chapters there's a clear sense of destiny around him: the way he was able to bend those around him to his will, landing jobs at Atari, securing funding for Apple, making deals with resellers.

Isaacson admits that he tried hard to avoid the influence of Jobs' famous "reality distortion field", and perhaps here and there he succumbs. But it's impossible not to imagine a wiry, manic Jobs aged 22 acting in the manner described and getting his way.

This, of course, also means that there was an ugly, ruthless side to Jobs, and many recall being insulted, dismissed and overlooked by Jobs even at that young age, traits well known throughout his distinguished career.

For those interested in Apple and Jobs the book is clearly going to be something of a must-read. The early chapters suggest that it will live up to the hype, magnified by Jobs' death on 5 October and the access to the Apple founder and those around him granted to Isaacson.

We'll have a full review on V3 when we've finished the 600-page epic.

V3.co.uk was lucky enough to be invited to the headquarters of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) to see what lies behind one of the greatest technological and scientific projects on the planet. Here, groundbreaking experiments are being conducted in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), generating an entire petabyte of data every second.

We also snapped a few images along the way.

Straddling the border of France and Switzerland, the project at CERN represents a pinnacle in international scientific collaboration, with 20 nations supplying funding to the project to enable scientists to look for the origins of the universe.

There are four islands of computer banks at CERN for the management of the main tools, including the LHC, and this requires nine full time staff to be in the room every second of the year.

A cutaway of the LHC showing the two tubes through which particles are fired in opposite directions at just below the speed of light (299,792,458m/s) eventually meaning they can complete a 27km loop 11,000 times a second.

A replica model of what the LHC looks like underground. There are only eight entrace points to the tunnel, meaning staff may have to walk several kilometres to reach the fault they are trying to fix. Or they can take a bicycle.

The entire LHC is cooled to a temperature of 1.9 kelvin (-271C) so every piece of metal has to expand and contract - the entire machine becomes 80m longer or shorter depending on its heat, so building links into the metal like this is crucial.

Four machines capture the results of the impact at the four collision points, sending back huge amounts of data to the CERN control centre where it is stored for analysis.

This creates around 25PB of data which CERN needs to store, but rather than doing it all itself, the organisation stores around 20 per cent. It uses the Grid, a world network of datacentres and storage facilities that, in agreement with CERN, hosts the rest of the data.

In among all the hoopla over the launch of the iPad 2, ViewSonic has decided to put its money where its mouth is and offer a 30-day money back guarantee for buyers of its ViewPad 7 tablet.

Anyone who buys one of the tablets in April has 30 days to try it out and, if they don't like it for any reason, they can simply return it to ViewSonic (with the receipt and packaging) after 20 days and the company will send them their money back, with an extra £10 to cover postage

"It's all about letting people get their hands on one and see for themselves," James Coulson, European marketing manager at ViewSonic, told Frontline.

"Touch wood, we've never had a bad review for the tablet, but we don't have the retail channel of Apple or Samsung. There's loads of people that have been exposed to only Apple or sometimes really low-end systems."

The 7.1in tablet runs Android 2.2 and comes with integrated phone capabilities, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and GPS. While the hardware is not as advanced as the iPad 2 the device is cheaper at £325, and the company is hoping the spread of consumer-friendly application sales from Amazon and others will drive demand.

It's a measure of Apple's hold on the market that a manufacturer would take such a step, but this is a tactic ViewSonic used last year and it seems to have worked. The deal certainly looks good enough to avoid a Hoover fiasco but what it will do in market share remains to be seen.

Analysts at IHS iSuppli have warned that the earthquake and subsequent power problems in Japan could affect electronics supply chains for some time to come, especially in the telecoms and consumer electronics sectors.

The rolling blackouts and shut downs of several key nuclear power plants across Japan which followed the magnitude 9.0 earthquake near Sendai earlier this month have caused the closure of key component facilities across Japan, many of which have yet to restart production.

These included over 20 semiconductor plants as well as display, battery and silicon wafer factories, which could have a knock on effect in the production of devices such as the iPad 2. Japan accounts for around a quarter of global silicon production, for example.

In the most likely scenario the disaster is unlikely to derail the global recovery, but some industries are likely to experience significant pain as continuing power capacity problems make it hard for these factories to get back on track.

IHS iSuppli even warned that supply may fail again during the high-demand summer season, causing more problems for electronics components manufacturers.

The market watcher said that the earthquake is likely to have cost the Japanese economy more than ¥20 trillion, which amounts to about four per cent of the country's GDP, although it predicted a strong bounce back once electrical generators come back online and factories reopen.