Help Me, Obiwan

7 November 2008



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CNN Debuts Hologram TV on Election Night

Tuesday's election night broadcasts brought a new form of TV to America. CNN used a new technology to create 3D images of guests and journalists. CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer told viewers early in the evening's coverage, “I want you to watch what we're about to do because you've never seen anything like this on television.” And indeed, one hadn't, except for Princess Leia in “Star Wars” repeating “Help me, Obiwan.”

CNN reported, “Chuck Hurley, the Washington bureau's senior producer of video and the staffer tapped by Bohrman to manage the execution of the 'hologram,' called it simple chroma-key technology that's been taken 'to the Nth degree. "Weathermen have been standing in front of green screens for years now, but that's [with] one camera," Hurley said. "Now we can do that times 35, so you can send all the way around the subject."

The technology is actually Israeli, created by a company called SportVU for filming soccer games. It hasn't been used for that yet. Instead for the past three months, SportVU has been working with CNN to get the hologramic TV idea off the ground for the election. They deliberately left a blue outline around their subjects to ensure that it wasn't too realistic.

Mr. Hurley said, “We could have had a much crisper, more realistic shot, almost to the extent where the viewer at home would have had no idea even that the person wasn't really there. You don't want to have the effect where it looks so good that for every future live shot, you have people on the blogs saying, 'Oh they're not really there--they're in a studio, faking the moon landing'.”

Impressive as it was, the question now arises whether it was worth anything. David Bohrman, CNN SVP and Washington bureau chief, believes it was, “television evolves, and how we do things evolves, and at some point -- maybe it's five years or 10 years or 20 years down the road -- I think there's going to be a way that television does interviews like this because it allows for a much more intimate possibility for a remote interview.” That may be, but what is really needed to go beyond HD is a hologramic TV set to complement the 35 cameras. And there still won't be anything worth watching when one is really in the mood.

© Copyright 2008 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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