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French Politician Uses Hologram To Hold Meetings In Two Cities At the Same Time (reuters.com) 101

neutrino38 writes: The French presidential election is approaching fast. One of the candidates, Jean-Luc Melenchon, used a hologram to hold two public meetings at once. With a political program that is mostly socialist and very left leaning, some people pointed out that he used private innovation to stand out from the crowd. Reuters notes that this is "not the first politician to employ such technology," adding that "in 2014, then-Turkish prime minister Tayyip Erdogan used a huge hologram of himself to attract wider support, while India's Narendra Modi trounced the opposition with a campaign that included holograms of his speeches in villages across the country." You can watch part of one of Melenchon's virtual meetings here.
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French Politician Uses Hologram To Hold Meetings In Two Cities At the Same Time

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  • WTF Time (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 06, 2017 @08:34PM (#53816181)

    some people pointed out that he used private innovation to stand out from the crowd.

    Somebody please explain the significance of selected statement here. Does being a candidate of the Socialist Party mean that one should be coy like a little princess? Isn't that equivalent to using alien technology for a politician?

    • This socialist candidate is not running for the Socialist Party. Many people consider the french Socialist Party is not socialist anymore.
    • This guy is closer to communist than socialist.To put the thing in perspective, he is hanging around telling that big tech corporation are evil on Earth and he wants to tax robots.
      • Where does he stand on Muslim immigration? Same as Hollande, or more similar to Le Pen?
      • by Sam H ( 3979 )

        Can you back that claim? Because on the other side of the spectrum, Mélenchon has also been criticised for openly praising the achievements of the Dassault companies, for instance, such as their CAD software CATIA (source: http://gauche.blog.lemonde.fr/... [lemonde.fr])

      • This guy is closer to communist than socialist.To put the thing in perspective, he is hanging around telling that big tech corporation are evil on Earth and he wants to tax robots.

        Since pretty much everything is taxed, why wouldn't robots also be taxed also? This argument isn't a very good one...

    • I don't get this either. What does a hologram really add here vs. normal people holding a gotomeeting/webex/whatever over 3 different continents regularly?

    • Re:WTF Time (Score:5, Funny)

      by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Tuesday February 07, 2017 @02:27AM (#53817309)

      Does being a candidate of the Socialist Party mean that one should be coy like a little princess?

      Please help me Obi Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope.

  • Hmmm (Score:1, Funny)

    by slick7 ( 1703596 )
    What was he doing, surrendering to two invaders at once?
  • What are his specific big issues?
  • by colinrichardday ( 768814 ) <colin.day.6@hotmail.com> on Monday February 06, 2017 @08:41PM (#53816227)

    Has anyone ever seen this guy and Palpatine in the same room together?

  • FWIW, his name is Melenchon, not Melanchon. Is it so hard to copy/paste correctly?
    • What the hell is copie/pâte?

    • by Anonymous Coward

      This is /.
      Call me when they will finally figure out UTF8 encoding.

  • In his holographic speech, he promised to be the most transparent candidate ever!

    Just kidding, he's a socialist - he promised to send guys with guns to take all your shit, unless you send it to him first.

    • You are generally allowed to keep your personal effects and such, which is why socialism has any popularity.
    • Obama's got a lot of criticism for running the most transparent administration in history. Look, if something is transparent, you can't see it. Doesn't anyone use dictionaries any more?
    • The thing is, politically, does it matter that he employed this technology? Does this bit of spectacle make his political positions any more valid or attractive? It shouldn't, because that would be incredibly shallow and superficial. It's just flash and bling. People are too easily mesmerized by shiny things. But then again, it works for Hollywood celebrities, so maybe he's on to something.

      • > t's just flash and bling. But then again, it works for Hollywood celebrities

        Flash and bling worked out pretty well for the Celebrity Apprentice too. :)

        I've noticed that it's very difficult to predict how well a candidate will do once after are elected and become president or whatever. Candidates that look pretty good turn out to be ineffective leaders, candidates that seem unqualified sometimes turn out to be very effective. I hope that pattern repeats in US.

  • Pepper's Ghost (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 06, 2017 @10:15PM (#53816641)

    Can we go easy on the word 'Hologram'? This is likely a pepper's ghost effect; as is 90%+ of what's being called a 'hologram' these days.
    It's a neat effect, and the Reuters image reveals a great reference for the setup (particularly interesting lighting rig), but lets reserve the h word for real examples of the phenomenon.

  • When the technological revolution is here to serve the communist revolution...
    Frickin' soviets...

  • Not a hologram (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Monday February 06, 2017 @11:01PM (#53816781)
    Marketers seem eager to abuse and misuse establish terms for advertising purposes. First "hoverboard", now "hologram".

    As best as I can tell (TFA is devoid of details), this is a glorified version of the system used at Hatsune Miku" concerts [youtube.com] - a simple rear projection onto a glass screen. A slightly more sophisticated version uses multiple cameras surrounding the person whose image is being broadcast, and switches between them depending on where the observer camera is positioned [cnn.com]. That creates the illusion that the observer can move around the image in 3D, but the illusion only works for the observer being tracked. Anyone else sees a 2D image which rotates depending on where the designated observer moves, not based on where they themselves move.

    A true hologram is not conveyed as an image. It is conveyed as an interference pattern created by taking a Fourier transform of a 3D light field. When you take another Fourier transform of that interference pattern (e.g. shine onto it coherent light equivalent to the light that originally created the pattern), it reconstructs the original 3D light field - a hologram.
    • Also known as a variation of "Pepper's Ghost" which has been a stage trick for over a century. That being said I was watching an episode of Futurama from 2012 where Nixon promises to build a border fence (it's a wall) along Mexico and another presidential candidate uses holograms to make public appearances in different places simultaneously. This shit is why the only sci-fi anymore is sci-fantasy or post apocalyptic. Cause as soon as you come up with something sci-fi like that's realistic it's actually jus
    • by chihowa ( 366380 )

      A true hologram is produced by recording (and then illuminating) the interference pattern created by coherent light interacting with an object.

      In the vernacular, however, the word "hologram" is used to describe any planar or volumetric "image" that is projected onto "empty space" (where "empty space" is anything that is sufficiently insubstantial, like air, a cloud of water droplets, or even a really really clean pane of glass that you almost can't tell is there).

      You're technically correct (the best kind of

  • India's Narendra Modi trounced the opposition with a campaign that included holograms of his speeches in villages across the country.

    He did? I thought he ran a campaign that was high on constant texting to citizens everywhere, and during the time that he was banned from the US, he used video-conferencing to attend the places he was invited to, but this is the first time I'm reading about him in a hologram image

  • According to the wik, "The development of the laser enabled the first practical optical holograms that recorded 3D objects to be made in 1962 by Yuri Denisyuk in the Soviet Unionand by Emmett Leith and Juris Upatnieks at the University of Michigan, USA." Commies and socialized public universities gave us the hologram.
  • by LordHighExecutioner ( 4245243 ) on Tuesday February 07, 2017 @03:27AM (#53817419)
    It has been discovered that candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon exists only as a hologram. No traces of his life on Earth have been discovered up to now, and he exists just under the form of a computer bot that once in a while interacts with real world through holograms. Further investigations are casting doubts about the reality of other politicians in the world: the lack of connections between politics and world problems is makes a strong evidence for the case. Is the world actually managed by an algorithm ? More at 11.00.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    I hoped that this is technical web and the first comment will be about word 'holography' misuse. But all just arguing that some politicians use videocalls for whatever reason.

    To clarify: These are not holograms. Hologram is a capture of light field in given plane. Such recording holds intensity of light (like classical photography) + Phase of the light wave. And yeah we are speking of capturing in units of nanometers per hologram element (like pixel). When reproduced, uniform coherent light (LASER apparentl

    • All the holograms I've seen suffer from speckle. That's hardly "indistinguishabe from reality."
  • What are the odds that he claimed two lots of expenses?

  • Not a hologram, It's simply projection onto a surface on the stage. Just like how Gorillaz does their live performances.

    Notice how they made sure NO photos of the projection are shown....

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