CNN's Wolf Blitzer to interview hologram strategists on election night
By Darren Murph 
posted November 4th 2008 4:24PM
posted November 4th 2008 4:24PM
As the news networks spend oodles of cash in order to one-up the other with whiz-bang visuals and mind-melting charts, CNN is looking to blow just about everyone else away. As election night officially kicks off in just a few hours, the network's Wolf Blitzer will be conducting interviews with faraway strategists not via the traditional two-pane window, but by hologram. Believe it or not, professionals in Chicago and Phoenix will be beamed live to CNN's New York studios in order to give viewers a look at Wolf and a ghostly counterpart. Granted, this is far from the first holographic / 3D interview we've seen, but it is rather impressive given the scenario. In related news, we're also told that FOX News will be touting a "giant wall with touch-screen technology [that] will provide electoral map results," which hopefully translates in geek speak to "Surface."[Via Hack-A-Day]
ok, i'm watching it right now but i don't get it. Is it just on our screen? I mean he can't actually be seeing her projection in the air, life isn't that good yet, so this must just be to give us the effect of her being there with him, which is great for us, but that means he's just looking at nothing and i think that is stupid. I want the r2d2 for real! Please tell me if I'm wrong.
I think it is real, she described the tent that they put around her in Chicago...But I don't think the CNN broadcast cameras picked it up right...Kind of like when you film a CRT television with a video camera too closely, you start to see scanlines or w/e...Such a shame, really, I was expecting to see something more similar to that Telstra demo.
To call it a Hologram really gets my goat. A hologram is produced using laser light reflecting off an object, onto a photographic plate, while it is bathed in an reference beam that creates interference patterns from every point on a object that is "seen" by the plate. When reilluminated, ideally by a similar laser beam, the object is "recreated" in 3-d and the eye perceives it as floating infront and or withing the plane of the photographic film.
Other pseudo holograms on the market include large Pepper's Ghost's which use an angled plane of transparent mylar and hidden projection screens to superimpose reflected imagery in front of stage setting or other people.
This is mostly an interesting way to videocomposite an image into a video frame. However, their breakthrough is that as the "real" camera moves in a studio, the images from the other green room cameras move in correct perspective based on positioning telemetry from the "real" camera.
P.S. Did I mention FAAAAAAIIIIIIIIILLLLLLLL!!!!!!!
Man, I tuned in literally 30 seconds before they beamed her in, it looks weird compared to the other videos available on the internet.
i just saw the hologram and i must say it was freaking SWEET. this is how news should be.
What they showed was interesting and is difficult to do, but as best I can tell it is not a hologram. Based on what they have described I would guess that they are generating a live 3d model of the remote correspondent using image-based rendering. The images are coming from an array of calibrated cameras in Chicago. This is a difficult problem to solve, but it was disingenuous of CNN to label it a hologram. As spacegravity4me noted, if they were somehow generating a "3d hologram", then Wolf would be able to see a 3D model of the correspondent on the set in front of him. I do not think that was the case, but if anyone has any evidence to the contrary I would be interested to hear about it.
Further evidence that this is probably a image-based rendering comes from that fact that SportVU and VizRT are providing the solution. SportVU provides some interesting replay systems for broadcast television that capture and segment and integrate the images from multiple fixed cameras to provide virtual replays from any point on the "pitch" (soccer mostly, so we can't call it a field). VizRT does the backend rendering for their replay system. I would guess that this is the next stage in the evolution of SportVU's product.
any screen caps or youtube clips of it yet?
Hologram her into your bed!
CNN I do so hate the drama queens.