this article, the technology used to bring us this incisive political coverage has been in development for nearly a decade, and cost thousands upon thousands of dollars. Way to go guys. I feel a lot more informed about the world around me. Good use of funds there.
You know, Lucas kind of nailed this effect in the late 70’s, so I’m not sure what all the fuss is about. Unless it’s about the fact that this hologram technology is actually
so superior to the “Star Wars effect” that, if they’d wanted, they could have made Jessica Yellin look so crisp and sharp that it would have seemed like she was
actually there in the studio, an effect so spectacular, it could only have been accomplished with a red eye flight to CNN headquarters or a camera aimed at a decent in-studio monitor.
Of course, the holograms gave the added benefit of Wolf Blitzer not having to actually interact with Will.i.am, but rather pretending to interact with a tennis ball on a stick, thereby salvaging his journalistic integrity.
How good were these imitations of holograms? So good, it turns out CNN had to “rough up” the holograms so that people at home wouldn’t just think that they were real images of people. CNN’s not about to shell out thousands of dollars for holograms that look like real images; they want blue glow and semi-transparent scan lines or you can just fuck right the fuck off. How else are they going to compete with Fox News’ new “All Fireworks News Hour?”
But amidst all the furor of CNN’s triumphant fake hologram technology and other news-related stuff that (I imagine) happened on the evening of November 4, an important point seems to have slipped past the collective consciousness. That point is this:
If a news network, whose only job is to inform us of facts, is willing to dedicate this kind of time and money to something as useless, frivolous, and childish as making a fake version of an imagined futuristic technology…WHERE THE FUCK ARE THE OTHER FAKE IMAGINED FUTURISTIC TECHNOLOGIES?
We may not be able to create a reliable hovercar on any large scale, but we could certainly rig up a nation-wide pulley and winch system!
And what of teleporters? We’ve got identical twins; let’s give their lives some meaning beyond being the main attractions in nature’s bizarre sideshow. Set one up on a pad in Berlin, the other on a pad in Chicago, spray some sparks, add a trapdoor, and viola! Teleportation. Hell, in a few years we’ll have reliable human cloning and then we can