CNN hologram Virtual View… not quite Star Wars
Now that the 2008 U.S. Presidential election is over and done with and Barack Obama has been named as the 44th President, we can actually look at some of the stories surrounding the election. Although CNN’s human holographic reporter isn’t actually what it reports to be, it’s still quite cool nonetheless.
We’ve all got very used to the idea of roving news reporters or correspondents reporting live from the scene of a news incident. It gives us as viewers a sense of being there, and knowing that the report is coming directly from the place of origin rather than Chinese whispers spun to the nth degree.
But, CNN is clearly bored of the idea of having a correspondent standing in front of a single camera with the news event unfolding behind them, and experimented with what it called ‘Virtual View’ during its election coverage.
The ‘Virtual View’ which anchor Wolf Blitzer also describes as a “hologram” saw Jessica Yellin turned in to Princess Leia for the night, being as she was in Chicago but also projected to look like she was also in the New York studio. Unfortunately, as impressive and visually stunning as this was, it’s not exactly Star Wars.
Gizmodo gives a full rundown of how the process works, with 35 high definition cameras used to transmit the entire body image of the subject from one place to the other. The whole thing is then synchronized by twenty computers constantly crunching the data in order to make the whole thing work correctly.
It’s not a hologram, and in no way could be described as a holographic projection, especially since Blitzer couldn’t actually see Yellin standing in front of him, and would have had to use a monitor to know she wasn’t flicking him the v’s. But to us as viewers it certainly looks like the two are in the same room as each other.
The method is quite kooky and it’s certainly nice to see a television news station pushing the boundaries of technology to offer its viewers something different than the norm, but I can’t see it catching on. The biggest reason for this is the lack of any atmosphere. Surely the whole point of an outside broadcast is to capture the mood and feeling from the event being covered, and this spectacularly fails to pass any of that across to viewers.
In fact, Yellin might as well have actually been standing in the studio next to Blitzer for all the good she was able to do from Chicago.
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November 7th, 2008
One step closer to fabricated news.