I don’t know if you’ve heard, but there was some pretty big news last night. And no, I’m not talking about Barack Obama becoming president elect - I’m talking about CNN’s new “hologram” technology:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thOxW19vsTg

…which seems pretty cool when you’re watching from your TV or computer screen, but once you dig in to the details, isn’t quite as amazing as it seems.

Creating the image is essentially the same technology as they used to make the ultra-slow-motion shots in The Matrix: a number of cameras (in this case, 35) are circled around the subject and a number of computers (20) are then used to process those different images to produce a single, 360-degree image of the person. The only difference with CNN’s technique is that they’re doing all of this in real-time, which I’ll admit is a pretty impressive step forward.

Unfortunately, the way in which that 360-degree image was then used is rather unimpressive: there was no hologram. In fact, Mr. Blitzer was actually talking to thin air in the YouTube link above. The only reason we the viewers got to see that three-dimensional image of Jessica Yellin was because the individual video feeds from each of the cameras inside CNN’s studio were having different angles of that 360-degree image overlaid on top of them. So, again, no hologram - just some moderately fancy real-time video editing.

Still, progress is progress. And if they are ever able to find a way to “project” that 360-degree image onto a sound field created by this technology:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSf2-jm0SsQ

…then we’d really be on to something. :-)

2 Responses To “Holograms: Close But Not Quite”

1. Soland   2008.11.05, 9:06 pm
   

   It appears that the CNN folks have been patrolling the ACM SIGGRAPH conferences and either directly hiring talent or giving them contracts to make the cool stuff. Examples of cool things at SIGGRAPH.

   I was simply impressed by their site A) staying up & responsive and B) having a relatively robust feature set. TechCrunch says that they got a 5x boost in traffic last night.

   I can’t wait until live TV becomes interactive (or at least interactive on your side of the screen). It would be fun to drop power-ups on the field during a football game. A player running over the power-up flashes, turns into the hulk and starts throwing other players around. Or you could slap around actors in an advertisement. Use Tivo to record your mischief and share it with others on YouTube.

2. nhelder   2008.11.07, 9:35 am
   

   Thanks for the links, Mike - that first SIGGRAPH one demoed some pretty interesting technologies.

   Back to the main post though: as it turns out, while CNN might not be able to do much with the 360-degree image they’re able to capture, CISCO certainly is:
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcfNC_x0VvE

   …so I guess true holograms are quite a bit closer than originally thought! (Thanks to Todd for providing this link in a separate thread.)

Post A Response