3-d Congress on Cnn last night.
 

I was watching the results last night on cnn for the election. I've already read the article on gizmodo for the hologram effect... (Cnn Hologram: How the CNN Holographic Interview System Works) but i was wondering about how in god's name they did the 3-d capitol building with live manipulation and aspect ratio changes.

I know they used a ton of computers and motion control, but still... good god what an effect. The only better thing would have been if it were actually there...

Yeah - I saw this last night too. The main problem is this "outer glow" around everyone who becomes a 3D model. It just looks cheap. If they get the green screen right, this technology will be awesome.

As for Wolf actually seeing the hologram - it could be done with mist (water vapor) and projection.

-C

The compression for some of the interview feeds was quite high. Uncompressed possibly was not possible to deliver reliably therefore resulting in fringing. will.i.am's holographic interview showed signs of fairly high compression and dropping frames due to the delivery over standard broadband rather than the 12mbps+ gateway broadband sometimes used for feature stories. The chroma key was done on the Headquarters side so that just increases fringing. This could be fixed if a compressed video format could support the alpha channel and do the chroma key on the reporter's side then transmit with alpha data to the HQ.

The Congress 3D model for showing seats in the senate just shows how powerful today's GPUs are (Nvidia Quadro Plex 2100 S4 anyone?)

I was highly impressed with NBC's virtual stage with real-time rendering 1080i and normal mapping, can you imagine how many racks of GPUs and CPUs that thing would need?

I had read that the fringe effect was deliberately added to make it more apparent that this was a "hologram"--had the effect been too convincing, making it look like the other person was literally in the studio, it might have been considered "false" as far as a news organization is concerned (the example used was chromakeying a reporter in a trench coat in front of a location as if they were actually there, which caused some fuss a few years back--now a running joke on "The Daily Show").

Amazingly, only one 4RU computer with Windows, two Xeon processors and the top NVidia card (don't know which one).

We did something very similar to this in HD late last spring. When we did it, we had a jib and a camera with a pan/tilt head. Everything was live (to disk). Worked smooth as can be after the techs got it all set up the day before.

-RD

Would that be a Quadro workstation GPU or a Nvidia 9 series or Nvidia 200 series GPU?