Tech & Biz

CNN Hologram: More Matrix than Star Wars

by Jordan Yerman | November 5, 2008 at 06:20 am

650 views | 7 Recommendations | 2 comments

Amid the mayhem of election day, lots and lots of people are talking about the CNN hologram interview between Wolf Blitzer and Jessica Yellin. Aside from looking a bit funny in terms of lighting, it's an interesting twist on remote interviewing and reporting...

But it's not really a hologram. In other words, Blitzer couldn't really see Yellin where we could see her. Basically she was recorded in the center of a ring of HD cameras, which caught her every move. This technique was perfected during the filming of the Matrix flicks ("bullet time", they called it, due to its slo-mo coolness), though CNN is using different cameras I think they could achieve a higher resolution if they wanted to, but suspect that they were aiming for a Star Wars effect..

The delay is either minimal, or we've gotten used to satellite delay that we don't even notice now
• An array of computers takes the crunched info feed from the subject's side in order to mesh it with the video from Wolf's side.
• Unfortunately, it doesn't look like the images are actually "projected" onto the floor of the CNN studio so that Wolf can actually talk to the person, you know, in a face to face. So it's not quite Star Wars just yet. Only after computers merge the video feeds together do you get a coherent hologram + person scenario

So, basically, it's a video-editing trick, but a pretty good video editing trick. You can try this at home... here's how!