Big winners are Obama and Technology

It has without any doubt been the most impressive US elections for a long time (maybe even ever). I guess most people watched the elections on TV and used the internet to keep up to date. This has lead to a huge amount of traffic to the CNN website. 276 millions of page views where there are “only” 35 millions normally. Not that bad. There have been more on 9/11, but the circumstances were definitely more comfortable yesterday. Also the other non-election related websites had many less page views than normally.

When looking at these figures we can assume many people went to the CNN site and I guess many others watched their live election broadcast and here we have seen some great stuff. Besides the perceptive pixel multi touch screen they already had for a while when talking about the elections in the last few weeks (a nice clip about this is shown here but this one is much more fun I think)

Besides this way of presenting CNN is also doing interviews. But instead of the split screen or window TV viewers might typically see during live remote interviews, the Obama spokesperson will be projected as a three-dimensional hologram, making it appear as if he or she is in the Manhattan studio with Blitzer. The network plans to conduct similar holographic interviews with representatives from the McCain campaign in Phoenix.

"Everyone is doing something virtual this election year," says CNN Senior Vice President David Bohrman, the guy who pushed the technology. But Bohrman believes CNN is going where no network has gone before by employing Hollywood-style effects. "Virtual elements in a real set look so much better than a real person in a virtual set," he says.

CNN will have 44 cameras and 20 computers in each remote location to capture 360-degree imaging data of the person being interviewed. Images are processed and projected by computers and cameras in New York. There'll also be plasma TVs in Chicago and Phoenix that will let the people being interviewed see Blitzer and other CNN correspondents. Bohrman says the network can project two different views from each city so Blitzer can appear to be in the studio with two holograms.

And CNN is not the only one bringing in new high tech. Let’s look at what the other did:

• Fox News has built three new HD studios for Tuesday night's broadcast so it can make better use of the additional TV real estate with updated county results, comparative numbers from previous elections and poll-closing times. A giant wall with touch-screen technology will provide electoral map results.
  
  "We've been planning for this night for two years," says Jay Wallace, vice president of news editorial product at Fox News.
  
  
• ABC's digital maps make their debut, letting correspondents look at up-to-the-minute votes by county, and compare votes as far back as 1960. Also, a double ticker line at the bottom of TV screens will display current popular and electoral totals for Barack Obama and John McCain. Beneath that will be results for Senate and gubernatorial races, says ABC News Creative Director Hal Aronow-Theil. For HD viewers, ABC is providing more information on the left margin of the TV screen.
  
  
• NBC spent the past year designing two studios that make the most of visual technology. One features intricate exit-polling information that digitally appears on a wall. The other studio lets political director Chuck Todd analyze presidential results by region, state and county. "We finally figured a way around using pie charts," jokes Phil Alongi, executive producer of election night for NBC News and its cable channel, MSNBC.
  
  NBC, too, plans to make use of a bigger HD screen size with detailed results from the presidential, congressional and gubernatorial races. And it has partnered with social-networking giant MySpace on Decision08, an online section that includes video, news feeds and blogs from NBC News.
  
  
• CBS News will analyze national and state exit-poll data, using state-of-the-art technology to display vote-counting and demographic data.
  Touch-screen technology will allow anchor Katie Couric to drill down on state and county results for all races, including propositions. "It is very fast technology using real-time data," says Frank Governale, vice president of operations for CBS News.
  
  
• Comedy Central, a go-to cable channel for political news for many young people, is teaming with a social-networking site. The TV home of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert is using the services of Meebo to host chat rooms for users to share their political views.
  Among CNN's other innovations on election night are a virtual Capitol Building used to illustrate the changing balance of power in Congress. But the most promising election winner is the hologram. "Either this is an evolution in the way we do live interviews on television," Bohrman says, "or it's a nice try."
  

Would this be the first step in creating the showcases to bring this into our daily life a bit more? At least one thing is clear. Besides Obama, Touch screen technology is the big winner