Thursday, November 06, 2008

Politics and Technology

Like many people, we too were glued to the TV on the US Presidential election night. While V actually watched the election coverage the entire time, I went missing for a while to my friend's place to watch an election movie Recount, which focuses on the 2000 election between Bush and Al Gore and the mess that was Florida.



I know CNN has been the frontier in the election coverage since past many months, going on and on, day after day, hour after hour - bringing panel of experts from all fields discussing each and every aspect of the campaign.



But on Election Night, I was bowled over by CNN - not by their extensive coverage or detailed analysis, but by the technology they have used. The "Magic Wall" in the CNN studio is a piece of technology art - a huge multi touch screen on which Wolf Blitzer and the rest where swiping maps just by a flick of a finger. Just by a touch they could pull our charts and numbers. And it was so smooth and slick.



But the best part of it all was when they went all sci-fi and Star War-sy by beaming up a hologram image of a reporter who was located remotely, right into their studio! My! That was impressive to say the least. They even managed to beam in Will.i.am!



Learn more in cnn.com about the Magic Wall and the Hologram.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

hey love the new template!!!

Colors said...

Hey Ekta, great to hear from you. Thanks!

fursat said...

I liked some of the graphics but call me old fashioned but the hologram was very creepy and it didn't add any value to the "news". I would assume they did this to bring some more eyeballs to the channel (and succeeded as CNN got huge ratings) but that means there content was weak. For me Larry King or Anderson Cooper is the only worth watching shows on CNN, which is again more content than technology.

fursat said...

I had got so used to your old template that pehle laga ke galat link pe aa gaya, but this is cool...very summery (good coz here the winter has started) :D

Colors said...

Ricky, yes, the hologram did not add any value to the news, except to filter the noise level at the correspondent's side. Infact, even CNN accepts that. But for me, it was more about the 'coolness' factor of the whole thing.
It did increase their rating, but you have to admit that this is the first step towards the future of TV journalism. Who know, 10-15 years from now, everyone might be doing this, with even better technology!

Colors said...

I too had gotten too confortable with my old template even though I never liked it much. This one, I just love it - I feel as if it was made for my blog...showing the colors of life :)

fursat said...

I think people have too much expectations from technology which most of the times doesn't translate well in real life. If we were to believe the technology pundits, we should been all flying our cars not driving them :D

Your new template has the 'coolness' factor and not the hologram :)