HTV

HTV stands for Holographic TeleVision.* It’s a somewhat futuristic concept, at least intended to be so in the story, Imagine Nation. It is ia fictional media form * one I made up, one that, if you can imagine, has such crisp clear focus and definition that it would virtually bring whatever is on the television screen before a person to... well, almost... life.

A HTV has the 3D holographic ability to make the person watching feel as if the scenery, people and events they are watching are touchable.The person viewing also can control the image so that they can view the image from various angles, in 3 D realism too! Better than Blue Ray or HDTV, a person watching HTV would feel just as if they were there, right in the middle of the action with bird’s eye view or a zoom-in capability as well as the feature of allowing a person to watch two or three views from anywhere on the screen at once. With it's pantented circular screen called a portal, a person could walk around the room and see the image from any angle.

While such a product might not be a complete reality yet, it might also not be so far-fetched to imagine such an appliance available to humanity in the not so distant future, for there is indeed a fascinating technological world at our fingertips, and one never knows what might be on the cutting-edge tomorrow. With so many incredible gadgets and gizmos it's easy to forget that television is a relatively new invention.

Television probably began with the invention of the cathode ray tube, which was invented in the late eighteen hundreds. Radios were the first things to send signals through the air that could be received but when the 1950’srolled around, television as a means of sending news and information over the airwaves became a major invention. Today televisions can be found in nearly every home in America. It's nearly a staple product in the diet of the human mind.

Most homes consider watching television part of their normal day, and TV producers know this. As a result, they give us commercial jingles that ring constantly in our brains, and schedule programming around household norms, hoping commercial advertisers will pay big money for air time and pay they do because people love to watch television. In fact, some people are addicted to the TV, so much so that they have it on all the time, others just watch the news. It seems like people think they have not lived unless they’ve gotten some new thought programmed into their head during the day.

Some of that programming is valuable or at least entertaining. There are nature programs, talk shows, news and weather channels, cooking shows where you can actually learn to make a grilled a cheese sandwich with boxer, George Foreman. There are sports programs and games, music channels, situation comedies, cartoons, art lessons, religious shows, animal features, variety shows, and shopping channels, just to name a few.

The tiny box that projects images is a widow to the world, a guiding light, and a ticket to adventure. has become like a guiding light, a lifeline and window to the world. Through it we can travel to places, to worlds both real and imagined, take trips through regions we never knew existed, learn something new, go shopping, laugh, cry, or or make money through advertising, and all from the comfort of our living room. As good and as interesting as it is today, television technologies are being developed; which is why the HTV in this story is still considerably fiction.

Any technology of the holographic kind that would be suited for possible television use is, at best, in it’s infant stages of development, but some entrepreneurs do believe it is the upcoming wave in television’s future. Some say that such holograms would prove useful for many things, including possibly identifying the differences between what is real and what is fake when you are viewing TV. This is important they say because the digital revolution that we are currently experiencing in photographic media is astounding, and with digital there is an incredible and unprecidented ability to manipulate subject matter.

For example, with digital photography, one can put rings around Mars, a planet that never had any, or interchange body parts between people to make up a person of your own, one that never even existed. The possibilities are nearly endless. One can change the physical attributes of a monument to make it fit better on a magazine cover and hardly anyone will even notice that it's been changed. Digital sound bites can be manipulated too.

The process of manipulating sound bytes is called “frankenbyting,” named after Mary Shelly’s novel monster named Frankenstein. These are made by taking selected parts of a recording and piecing them together, digit by digit which can take a persons own voice and create words or phrases (sound “bytes”) the person actually speaking never said.

Television has taken us many places. We can watch real time war on the other side of the planet, as television camera crews in Baghdad give minute by minute plays of incoming missiles as they are bombed at their hotel. All we have to do is sit back, relax, pop open a beer can for a bit of a libation after a hard days work, and watch the war. If that gets boring we can flip over to another channel where we watch some very realistic looking and sounding war scenes from the middle ages and never stop to think they were not real at all, for they could have only been filmed in a movie studio. In our media saturated culture, we accept whatever we see playing before us on the screen almost without thinking about it for what it really is.

We are spectators, saturated.

People used to be outraged at things like murders and robberies, but we’re fascinated, interested and want to know every detail. And we are so conditioned to be spectators of the world as it passes by, that we barely blink an eye when it comes to ethical controversies. Seldom bothered by the promiscuous or inane, we have become, as the Pink Floydian poet said, “comfortably numb.”

Fact or fiction, sometimes it hard to know, sometimes we do not even care. We just want TV writers and producers to conjure up images that please our senses, make our hearts race, make us laugh and make us cry, and they know we love it when they do. We live in an age when people no longer think about what it is that they are watching, no longer, or even seldom question why. We just watch it, often just because it's something to watch, and because the TV's simply "on." Sadly, its rare to dare to think outside the box and and rare to care if what your watching is fiction or not.

HTV (holographic television) is fiction, but if it were to happen you can bet it will open up a whole new way to see your world. It may even be more like science fiction, even then, for who know, it may even be a way for you to be lost forever to reality, as you find it so fascinating and alluring that you open up the portal in your living room and step inside.