CNN’s US election night stunt, in which reporter Jessica Yellin and rapper will.i.am appeared on set as three-dimensional “holograms”, was little more than smoke and mirrors, physics experts say.

In what was billed as a world-first, Yellin appeared to be beamed from Chicago into the network’s New York studio for an interview with anchor Wolf Blitzer. But, in fact, Blitzer was looking at little more than a red mark on the floor.

Blitzer made every attempt to hide the fact that the hologram was fake, saying “Jessica, you’re a terrific hologram” and that he liked the hologram because “we can have a more intimate conversation”.

Yellin likened herself to a character from Star Wars, saying, “It’s like I follow in the tradition of Princess Leia.”

A second “hologram” interview was aired between another anchor, Anderson Cooper, and will.i.am, who, like Yellin, was in Chicago for President-elect Barack Obama’s election night celebrations.

“It looks exactly like in Star Trek when they would beam people down, that’s what it looks like right here,” Cooper said.

But Hans Jurgen Kreuzer, theoretical physics professor and holography expert at Dalhousie University, told CBC news in Canada that the so-called holograms were simply 2D images superimposed onto the TV broadcast.

The images were in fact tomograms, or images captured from all sides – in this case by 35 high-definition cameras set in a ring inside a special tent – reconstructed by computers and displayed on the screen.

A real hologram would have meant the images were projected into space, which did not occur as Blitzer and Cooper could not see their interview subjects.

It’s good to know that CNN cannot be honest about anything.

Update: I almost missed this:

To perform its stunt, CNN used technology from Vizrt, based in Norway, and SportVu, based in Israel.

Answer: When it leads to this:

The life of 20-year-old Emine, and her 24-year-old husband Ramazan Çalçoban was pretty much the normal life of any couple in a separation process. After deciding to split up, the two kept having bitter arguments over the cellphone, sending text messages to each other until one day Ramazan wrote “you change the topic every time you run out of arguments.” That day, the lack of a single dot over a letter—product of a faulty localization of the cellphone’s typing system—caused a chain of events that ended in a violent blood bath (Warning: offensive language ahead.)

The surreal mistake happened because Ramazan’s sent a message and Emine’s cellphone didn’t have an specific character from the Turkish alphabet: the letter “ı” or closed i. While “i” is available in all phones in Turkey—where this happened—the closed i apparently doesn’t exist in most of the terminals in that country.

The use of “i” resulted in an SMS with a completely twisted meaning: instead of writing the word “sıkısınca” it looked like he wrote “sikisince.” Ramazan wanted to write “You change the topic every time you run out of arguments” (sounds familiar enough) but what Emine read was, “You change the topic every time they are f****** you” (sounds familiar too.)

Emine then showed the message to her father, who – enraged – called Ramazan, accusing him of treating his daughter as a prostitute. Ramazan went to the family’s home to apologize, only to be greeted by the father, Emine, two sisters and a lot of very sharp knives.

Injured and bleeding, with a knife on his chest, Ramazan tried to escape. Emine was still trying to finish him on the door, but he managed to take the knife out of his chest and attacked back, wounding her. Ramazan finally escaped, and was caught by the police, but Emine bleed to dead as the family waited for an ambulance to cross Ankara’s hellish traffic to reach their home.

Confused by all the events, he later killed himself in jail.

Apparently it’s not the first incident of this kind caused by the damned dot on top of the letter i. The local press has pointed out that the faulty localization of cellphones in Turkey is causing “serious problems” when it comes to certain “delicate words” in Turkish, and they are calling to enhance localization of technology to avoid these mistakes.

Of course, you can’t blame this all on the technology. After all, it seems that Emine and her family may have also been a dot short of a good localization.

So to speak.