US: CNN hologram a sham?

Posted by Rosemary D'Amour on November 10, 2008 at 1:50 PM

The three-dimensional holograms featured on CNN's live coverage of election night are still making headlines a week later--not because they were a "first" for television, but because, as it turns out, they weren't holograms at all.

Hans Jürgen Kreuzer, a "professor of theoretical physics at Dalhousie University and an expert on holography," told CBC that the images produced by CNN didn't have "anything to do with holograms."

Holograms, said Kreuzer, are images projected into space. The images CNN produced were in fact tomograms, or "images that are captured from all sides, reconstructed by computers, then displayed on screen."

CNN officials, CBC said, could not be reached for comment.

New York-based CNN anchors Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper were speaking to empty space, rather than three-dimensional images, during their interviews with reporter Jessica Yellin and Black Eyed Peas rapper Will.I.Am., both in Chicago.

35 high-definition cameras captured the interviewees. 20 computers processed and synchronized the image, which was then added to the screen for viewers at home, "much the same way computer-generated special effects are added to movies."

Although the technology was "sophisticated," the fuzzy image and "glow around the edges" of the image were the giveaway, Kreuzer said.

Technology is "not far from being able to do what CNN tried to do," Kreuzer said. He suggested that light-emitting diodes would be "considerably safer" than the lasers required to produce holographic images.

LED's are also considerably cheaper than the technology that would be needed for holograms. Although the network has not released a specific amount, the estimated cost for the "hologram" election coverage lies anywhere from $300,000 to $400,000, leading us to wonder how far a network will go for viewers.

Source: CBC