Well, OK. That’s not strictly true.
For starters, the BBC Election Night programme in 2006 didn’t use REAL holograms. But then neither did the recent CNN election special.
For the secrets behind the CNN programme you should visit the VizRT website where it explains the process of using 35 HD cameras and a bunch of Viz boxes to place a real person into a real studio with a fuzzy border around them.
BBC Hologram from 2006
On my own site you can read some of the background behind the 2006 BBC Election Holograms – whereby we placed a real person in an entirely virtual studio (which matched the look and feel of the real studio next-door) and introduced a number of graphic ‘projections’ which were, of course, just animated textures designed to look a bit like Princess Leia from Star Wars.
The BBC production was put together on a bit of a shoestring budget (luckily enough for the licence payers), but we were fortunate enough to pick up a Broadcast Designers’ Association (BDA) award for the ‘Ascent of Tory Man’ graphic sequence.
The reasoning behind the use of ‘holograms’ in 2006 was three-fold. The production was already going to be using the Brainstorm VR system. We were also looking for something that complemented the night-time feel of the programme – ideally ‘lighting up’ the graphics in some way. Lastly, I was keen to make an obvious visual distinction between the virtual ‘studio’ elements and the virtual ‘content’ elements (i.e. the analysis and the results) – so the flickering ‘projected’ quality of the images was extended to include the histograms, line graphs etc, while the surrounding VR studio was designed to look as much like the real discussion studio next door where David Dimbleby was hosting the main programme.
Anyway. I’m not suggesting that what we did in 2006 and what CNN did last week were the same thing. For one thing, we were only inserting flat graphic elements as opposed to real live people. The image of Tony Blair here appeared as though it was being projected somehow into the studio space, but obviously if the camera panned round the back we wouldn’t see the back of his head. Still, I think we did a pretty good job of faking a holographic ‘feel’.
I expect that CNN could quite easily have embedded the ‘holographic’ people seamlessly with the real studio, rather than fuzzing them up a bit (actually it ended up just looking like very poor keying – probably intentionally). But unfortunately if they’d made it look more professional then no-one watching would have noticed anything strange or clever at all, and might have been tempted to think – what on earth was the point of all that????
Actually, come to think of it, what was the point of all this??