Hologram Will.i.am Infinitely Less Punchable

Lucas Jensen | November 5, 2008 10:00 am

The elections must be an exciting time for the news networks because they get to trot out all manner of gadgets and broadcast wizardry that they’ll probably never get to use again. It’s like they got to go shopping at Skymall for just one day! Fox News had Bill Hemmer’s Minority Report-like touchscreen board, and NBC showcased a “virtual studio” wherein poor Anne Curry stood in a green room while some producer whipped stats around her. But the neatest–and most useless–of these studio tricks was CNN’s hologram projections, wherein reporters and others were given the Princess Leia treatment.

One of those people who popped out of CNN’s R2D2 was “Yes I Can” composer will.i.am, who now has some measure of newsworthiness because of that damned song. A good portion of the interview was talking about the “Oh, cool!” factor of being beamed via hologram. The rest was devoted to Will.i.am’s “political” “thoughts,” which have been given unfortunate credibility by his viral video. I shudder to think about that celebrity-ridden pile of self-aggrandizement being shown in politics classes for years to come as an example of “successful” political discourse. Ugh.

But, yeah, the hologram? Pretty cool. Totally useless. And not just because it was Will.i.am that was beamed aboard.

Princess Leia hologram reporting for CNN! [Yahoo!]