by Linda Holmes

It was a late night for a lot of people, including me, but I think it's safe to say that the pop-culture story of the election coverage last night -- unrelated to the outcome -- was this very weird use of "hologram"-style technology by CNN to project an image of someone in the studio.

This is...about how it looked on live television, which is to say: weird. And it was used in only two settings that I personally saw: this bit, and a later appearance by will.i.am, the musician who famously created a video for Barack Obama that went widely viral.

It might have felt more special if it had been...you know, a person who couldn't possibly be in the studio, like Cindy McCain or an Alaska candidate who was actually watching his own returns from his living room. But for this, it just wasn't clear...why.

Why a hologram instead of just a talking head on a screen? I understand the constant drive for more sophisticated election-coverage doodads -- not that many of us didn't find ourselves missing Tim Russert scribbling on a whiteboard -- but this one seemed like a flop.

It looked remarkably real, I guess, compared to a cardboard cutout of a person. But it did not look realistic. It looked like the first pass at a CGI sequence from a movie called Wolf Blitzer: The Revenge. I give it an F-minus.

categories: Television

10:05 - November 5, 2008

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