CNN's "Hologram" Just Video Quackery, Not Holographic

What was supposed to be a "gee-wiz" moment for the CNN election coverage was more of a "so what". Wolf Blitzer breathlessly alerted viewers to something that they had never seen before as correspondents at Grant Park were "hologrammed" into the CNN studio.

That got my interest so I watched as a poor quality image of the correspondent appeared on a red dot on the floor of the studio. It looked less convincing than Princess Leah's urgent message to Obi-Wan in Star Wars. and that was done with 30 year old film technology and optical printers.

In reality the alleged Hologram was a green screen image capture technique using dozens of cameras surrounding the subject in Grant Park. The images were knitted together electronically and matched to the camera movements in the CNN studio to simulate the presence of the remote subject. Sounds pretty high tech doesn't it?

Well in practice it looked slightly worse than the first "chroma-key" set up I used to use when working in live TV back in the 1970's. The edges of the person were fuzzy and ringed with a blue cast and though the camera moved and the perspective was supposed to change accordingly, it looked like a flat paper doll as photographed through a screen door.

My suspicion is that the image looked really clear and some genius at CNN decided it needed to look more like a hologram, so they trashed it up and added a blue glowing edge. Either way it was a fraud. This technique has nothing to do with Holograms. Those images are made using lasers and not TV cameras. In fact to view a hologram you must actually look through the film it is recorded on to see the image illusion of 3-D. So far a projected hologram is the holy grail and has yet to be achieved and in the view of many will never be a reality beyond the fictional realm of Star Trek.

Now, CNN, why not apologize for the fraud and just do a damn interview with the guest on a remote camera. After all, why "beam in" the guest from a location where news is actually happening when you can just cut to that location and see the news. Seems a better use of television technology to me.