CNN Hologram Interview: Big Setup To Produce "Star Wars" Like Technology

It was an election night like none other, in every sense of the phrase. 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." And he was right. Cue CNN political correspondent Jessica Yellin.

"Hi Wolf!" said Yellin, waving to Blitzer as she stood a few feet in front of him in the network's New York City studios. Or at least, that's the way it appeared at first glance.

In reality, Yellin -- a correspondent who had been covering Sen. Barack Obama's campaign -- was at the now president-elect's mega-rally along the lakefront in Chicago, Illinois, more than 700 miles away from CNN's Election Center in New York.

It looked like a scene straight out of "Star Wars." Here was Yellin, partially translucent with a glowing blue haze around her, appearing to materialize in thin air. 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."

The technology involved placing a subject in the middle of a bright-green circular room inside a large tent at Obama's Grant Park victory celebration. The subject was then filmed with 35 high-definition video cameras, barely larger than average point-and-shoot cameras, which ringed the wall of the circular room. The video cameras were 6 inches apart and at eye level, 220 degrees around the subject.



According to Gizmodo, this is what CNN used to create this visual trick:

On the subject's side:

• 35 HD cameras pointed at the subject in a ring.
• Different cameras shoot at different angles (like the matrix), to transmit the entire body image.
• The cameras are hooked up to the cameras in home base in NY, synchronizing the angles so perspective is right.
• The system is set up in trailers outside Obama and McCain HQ
• Not only is it mechanical tracking via camera communication, there's infrared as well.
• Correspondents see a 37-inch plasma where the return feed of the combined images are fed back to them.
• Twenty "computers" are crunching this data in order to make it usable.
  

On the HQ side:

• Only used on two out of 40-something total camera feeds that CNN has.
• 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.
  

Here is the video that talks about the secret of this magic ...


Read Also:
Beam me up, Wolf! CNN debuts election-night 'hologram' (CNN Technology)
How the CNN Holographic Interview System Works (Gizmodo)