So the fact that Barack Obama won and there was a big giddy drunken dance party is great and all, but let us not forget the most amazing thing that happened last night: That we, as a people, realized with panic, fear, and delight THAT HOLOGRAMS NOW WALK AMONGST US, TALKING AND GESTURING AND GLOWING, AS WILL.I.AM PUT IT, “LIKE IT’S STAR WARS AND STUFF.”
“Let’s see if we can ‘beam him in’ now!” Anderson Cooper (Channel 1 represent!) eagerly said on CNN–ushering us into a new age in which humans’ days are numbered and blue, glowing shadows of ephemeral holo-people can do and say as they please, with absolutely no regard for our universe’s physical or social laws.
Can YOU tell the difference?
Wired has the terrifying story about how CNN wasted their money pushed the technological envelope accidentally started Cyberdine Systems doomed us all:
The hologram didn’t actually appear in the CNN studio. Instead, it’s an effect visible only to TV viewers thanks to a massive array of cameras and some really impressive real-time video processing.
To make it work, the virtual correspondents were sequestered in quiet rooms and “scanned” through motion capture and camera-tracking telemetry.
Each VR-enabled room had between 35 and 44 small, fixed cameras, which combined to take in a 360-degree image of the person. The studio also had 20 PCs crunching the data.
Once collected, the data was processed by graphics software, which synchronized the angles needed to produce an accurate render that matched up with what the main CNN cameras were showing.
Translated from geekspeak, I’m pretty sure this means we’re all screwed. As the old maxim goes, “ONE CANNOT TRUST ROBOTS, AND ONE DOUBLY CANNOT TRUST HOLOGRAMS–ESPECIALLY HOLOGRAMS OF WILL.I.A.M.”
Wow. Seems unnecessarily complicated. One camera, mounted on a circular track with a motorized cart, in a room with blue walls on all sides, controlled by a single 1980s era computer so that the camera angle of the main studio, and the camera angle of “hologram” studio are identical would have generated the same 2-D image to paste into the 2-D broadcast, for 1/100th of the cost.
I’m reminded of the story of the Russian and American space programs. We needed a way to write things down in zero gravity, and since most pens don’t work upside down we spent several million dollars developing and testing a pen that was under pressure so that ink would flow out of it, yet wouldn’t leak when it wasn’t writing and above all, wouldn’t splatter ink all over the place if they bumped into it wrong. The Russian used a pencil.