Archive for November 5th, 2008

THE WORLD should look different today, but it does not. The streets look much the same as they did Tuesday, Monday and many days before. The leaves are piling in the gutters and kicked aside by children on their way to meet the school bus. A wet wind gusts out of the south, promising one more day of warm weather before autumn reality returns.

On the day after Barack Obama’s election, San Francisco and the nation are physically unchanged, and that seems wrong.

It seems wrong because so many things have changed in the past 24 hours — expectations, assumptions and old, worn-out certainties.

None of that is visible today, because little has changed in the world:

Only hearts and minds.

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Among the wackiest technologies that I’ve seen during this election night is CNN’s hologram technology — something that was predicted back in the Star Wars era.

There’s not much info as to exactly how this stuff works, other than what USA Today has reported:

CNN will have 44 cameras and 20 computers in each remote location to capture 360-degree imaging data of the person being interviewed. Images are processed and projected by computers and cameras in New York. There’ll also be plasma TVs in Chicago and Phoenix that will let the people being interviewed see Blitzer and other CNN correspondents. Bohrman says the network can project two different views from each city so Blitzer can appear to be in the studio with two holograms.

Jessica Yellin was the first CNN reporter to be "beamed" to the New York newsroom, where Wolf Blitzer interviewed her — and she reported that there were only 35 cameras pointed at her, and that "talk to the cameras in New York." Apparently representatives in the Obama campaign in Chicago and the McCain campaign in Phoenix will be interviewed as holograms later in the evening.

It’s still unclear who makes this hologram technology, nor how much it costs, nor how exactly it works — nor when I’m going to get it in my house. Man, and I was just getting used to Skype video chat. Still, scope out the video below.

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