3D TV? That’s so 2010, don’t you think?
In a bid to get the World Cup soccer tournament in 2022 — 12 years from now — Japan is proposing to broadcast the games as holograms.
That’s right, World Cup games could be beamed to home countries and projected as 3D images on to real soccer fields so that people in the stands could see the game as if it were being played before their eyes.
With microphones placed under the playing field, the experience of recreating a soccer game in holograms thousands of miles away from where the game is being played would be complete, Japanese officials said.
The Japanese are not guaranteeing the technology to do such a thing will be available by 2022, according to reports.
But they’re promising in their proposal that, if something like it is available, they would do it no matter what the cost.
The World Cups committee’s director of technology, Jun Murai, told reporters that the proposal “smacks of science fiction” but that it would be taken seriously.
The first game of this year’s World Cup games in South Africa will be aired in standard 3D for the first time on a new ESPN channel.
Holograms have been tried on TV before — most recently in 2008 during CNN”s election night coverage when the singer Will.I.Am was interviewed by Wolf Blitzer.