p2pnet news view | TV:- “There are 35 high definition cameras were ringing me … I’m in the centre and they shoot my body at different angles and I’m told that transmits what looks like an entire body image back there to New York.”

So said CNN’s Jessica Yellin during the service’s Barack Obama coverage.

“It was an election night like none other, in every sense of the phrase,” says CNN.

“In addition to the obvious — the selection of the nation’s first black president — Tuesday night’s coverage on CNN showcased groundbreaking technology.

“I want you to watch what we’re about to do,” CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer told viewers early in the evening’s coverage, “because you’ve never seen anything like this on television.”

Here was Yellin, “partially translucent with a glowing blue haze around her, appearing to materialize in thin air,” says the story, continuing:

“She even referenced the classic movie on her own, saying, ‘It’s like I follow in the tradition of Princess Leia. It’s something else’.”

CNN dubbed it a “hologram” — a three-dimensional image, says the post, going on »»»

The technology in play was originally developed by Israeli-based company SportVU (pronounced “sport view”) as a new way of filming soccer games.

Gal Oz, a SportVU designer who came to the United States to work with CNN on the endeavor, said it was originally designed “to create a matrix effect in sports” — in other words, to provide 360 degrees of perspective for instant replays.

But it hasn’t been used for its intended purpose yet. Instead, for the past three months, the company has been perfecting it for CNN’s election coverage, Oz said. Tuesday night’s live interview of Yellin was essentially the technology’s world debut as well.

Hurley and Oz agree that as good as the image looked on television Tuesday, it can look even more realistic. Hurley said the blue glow around Yellin and Will.i.am was added intentionally to avoid confusion.

“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,” Hurley said.

“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.’ “

Like wowee, eh?

Maybe not.

“Send a reporter from New York to Chicago so you can put their image in the studio in New York,” says humbrew in a comment to the YouTube video below. “Is this the Daily Show?”

And, “I would like to know if he saw that image in the studio with him,” says snicko66.

“Then it would be a hologram.Otherwise, Yeah, just chroma key and camera tracking.”

So was it real, or only make believe?

Stay tuned.

CNN – Beam me up, Wolf! CNN debuts election-night hologram, November 6, 2008

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This entry was posted on Thursday, November 6th, 2008 at 3:11 pm and is filed under TV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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