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Remember in Star Wars way back in the distant 1970s, in a galaxy far, far away, when Princess Leia appeared as a tiny figure beamed from R2D2 asking for help for the empire? Thirty years later, that technology is not so far, far away, nor is it just a moviemaker’s science-fiction fantasy. On Election Day, on CNN, reporter Jessica Yellin appeared lifelike on the set of CNN’s New York Election Center, having a conversation with Wolf Blitzer about the latest returns. In reality, she was a hologram image, beamed from a remote studio set up at Grant Field in Chicago. Sitting in front of thirty-five HD cameras, twenty computers processed her image and then projected her onto the national news stage.

A month earlier, John Chambers, the chairman of Cisco systems, one of the companies producing this new hologram technology appeared on a stage at a technology conference in Bangalore, India, and had a conversation with Marthin De Beer, the head of Cisco Systems’ Emerging Technology Group. In reality, Chambers was 14,000 miles away at the Cisco headquarters in San Jose, Calif., and being beamed to India using the group's new technology dubbed the Telepresence System 3000.

Such systems, which cost upwards of $300,000 to customers, are cost-prohibitive now, but ever since the technology was introduced to a mass audience on CNN, technology enthusiasts have been imagining all the potential uses in the future -- everything from saving money and gas emissions, to thinning the traffic of business travel, to the creation of virtual classrooms, to shopping trips, and even visits to the shrink’s office. But the question that real tech geeks want to know is, how on earth did the technology evolve to make what was once a movie fantasy into a business reality?

As for the CNN magic, it was not Cisco’s machine, but a technology created by a partnership between two companies, VizRT, based in India, and SportVu, in Israel.

SportVu typically focuses on providing instant replay performance data from sporting events; in December, the company was acquired by Stats LLC, a Chicago-based sports data company. According to Brian Kopp, vice president of strategy for Stats LLC, the SportVu was appealing for its optical tracking system, which can be used to measure the movements of players on a football or soccer field. Censors that are run by software do everything from calculating a player’s speed, to the position of the ball, to players’ fitness levels -- all of which is then broadcast to viewers during a game.

“It’s a new level of sports data,” says Kopp.

The same optical tracking system is also behind the hologram system used by CNN on election night. In fact, says Kopp, CNN approached SportVu last July and asked them to specifically customize the system for election night.

“A lot of what you saw on election night was what CNN wanted it to look like," says Kopp.

The way it works, explains Kopp, is that tracking cameras were set up in the main CNN studio in New York City. A type of software in the cameras communicated with plug-in software that runs the Viz engine, which is a graphical broadcast engine created by the partner company VizRT. In Chicago’s Grant Park, CNN created a broadcast center with 35 cameras set up in a 220-degree circle. Jessica Yellin sat in front of the cameras in a remote green room. The cameras, which use the same censors used to capture sports field movement, then captured images of the reporter from 30 different angles and sent them to the tracking cameras in the main studio in New York City. The cameras in turn broadcast a full 3-D, lifelike graphical image on the stage in the Election Center, so it looked to viewers -- as well as to Blitzer -- as though she were actually present on the set. (Yellin also got to see a return feed of her image just in case she needed to fix her lipstick.)

“You can put a 2-D image in pretty easily, but the real power of the system is to be able to create a moving 3-D image so you can see the true view of what that person looks like,” says Kopp.

To make this technology a viable and more affordable product for broader use, Stats LLC, is now working on ways to simplify it. In the future, they imagine using it for remote interviews, business meetings, and even for celebrities who can’t be there in person to accept an award. The technology and location for use “doesn’t have to be a massive studio, and right now we’re trying to make it smaller and more practical,” says Kopp.

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