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Cameron's Avatar a 3D Drug Trip?
bowman9991 writes "James Cameron's first movie since Titanic, his upcoming science fiction epic Avatar, has a budget pushing US$200 million and enough hype to power a mission to Mars. Now it appears the 3D technology he created to turn his vision into a reality, the key to Avatar's success or failure, may be habit forming. Dr. Mario Mendez, a behavioral neurologist at the University of California, said it is entirely possible Cameron's 3D technology could tap brain systems that are undisturbed by conventional 2D movies. Cameron himself believes 3D viewing 'is so close to a real experience that it actually triggers memory creation in a way that 2D viewing doesn't' and that stereoscopic (3D) viewing uses more neurons, which would further heighten its impact."
I personally plan on smoking some weed before I see it.
I wish I knew where I could find some mushrooms...
Do we get 3d porn!!
oogly boogly!
At $200 million, they're approaching the ability to fund a mission to Mars.
After watching several 3D movies back to back, I now find myself completely addicted to 3D and finding myself craving it all the time in my everyday life. I've tried to give it up, but after only a few minutes of having one eye shut I start to get a headache and my eye muscles get sore, not to mention I'm completely unable of functioning and find myself bumping into things and knocking things over when I reach for them. James Cameron must be stopped!
The enemies of Democracy are
Just because something is 3d, it doesn't necessarily excite the brain... I'm staring at my desk in 3d right now, and all I feel is bordom...
I'm not surprised it'd be habit forming, with the amount of pills Dr Mario throws down patients' throats.
Damn, now I want to pull out a SNES and play Mixed Match..
In other news, a purveyor of some media claims it's the best thing evar!!11!! You'll have to pay 10$ to see for yourself, but do not miss it!
I think the only important word in the article is $200M. This means hype, and lots of it. Don't be fooled kids, they need you to help pay for this cartoon.
"It was like doing some kind of drug," he said, describing a scene showing Sam Worthington running around "with this kind of hot alien chick," and being attacked by jaguarlike creatures. He was sprinkled with sprites that floated down, like snowflakes. "You feel like the little feathery things are landing on your arm".
In other words, it's a typical fantasy movie with spaceships masquerading as science fiction.
Finally, is it me or is this an Onion story reject? A bit more funny and it'd fit right in.
I saw The Terminator 3D at universal studios when I was 8, and I've been looking for John Connor since then.
Neal Stephenson called it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_crash
One of the plot devices is a drug that can be absorbed visually.
Interestingly, Stephenson is also the one who coined the modern use of 'Avatar' in virtual worlds.
No, seriously though, guys, this 3d movie IS SOOOO 3d, that if it made sense, I'd just go ahead and label it with a few more dimensions. In fact, it's 4d! By the time you leave the theater, you'll feel like you're in the future! Hours will have passed!
TLDR: 3d is the same as it's been, nothing to see here, move along.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
ORLY?
And what if I went to a theater, with THREE DIMENSIONAL HUMAN BEINGS walking around on a THREE DIMENSIONAL STAGE! How would my "inner global-positioning system" react to that!
Just the usual bollocks that "news" magazines print when a big movie comes out. Remember the stories about "possible giant apes" when King Kong was released?
And Slashdot goes along with it, uncritically regurgitating the crappy pseudo news written to promote the next Big Summer Movie.
The movie itself may well be fun. But news and science shouldn't whore themselves out to Hollywood.
If you think viral marketing is bad now, just wait until they start putting advertising payloads in the flu.
Every case of intestinal distress comes with a sudden urge to watch High School Musical XIII.
Or is it the other way around?
syBERT!! Guess who's sleeping on the couch tonight!
For all the "bah humbug" blathering on this thread, methinks there's something to it.
Surely most of us geeks have noticed the difference in mental state & perception caused by 24FPS, 30FPS, 60FPS, 3:2 pulldown, and other differences in visual medium. Each causes a different psychological state, with some causing more of a stupor and others more a sense of real. 3D, done right, will lead to other mental effects. I don't think a major director experimenting with new technology would be BSing us about what it does to the viewer's mind.
Personally, I've seen one 3D IMAX film (something about Egypt) which unlike other "hey wow it's 3D!" movies really did give a deep sense of "being there". Move that effect to a full-blown bleeding-edge movie by a director known for pushing visual limits, and we may very well experience something new.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Consider Ramachandran's mirror box, a means of using illusion to "cure" the pain of phantom limbs. From the Wikipedia article:
If such a low-tech visual illusion can rewire neurons, what can a high-fidelity, 3-dimensional illusion accomplish? (I'm not saying that Cameron's movie is going to have such effects, but how far will the technology go?)
Getting tired of Slashdot... moving to Usenet comp.misc for a while.
I'm not blind, but because I was cross-eyed for many years before I had corrective surgery, my brain tends to focus out of one eye primarily. My stereoscopic vision is quite limited, thus reducing depth perception and making it nearly impossible to see using those 3D glasses.
I remember staring at those Magic Eye posters for hours, frustrated that all the other kids could see dolphins and ships and stuff, while all I saw was a bunch of weird looking colors.
Thanks to the wonders of a college class on Visual Perception, I now understand why. Mod this "+5, Woe is me"?
1) The article is Slashdotted.
2) Anyone who viewed "Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D" (With BRAND NEW 3D technology!!) knows that a crap film is a crap film no matter how many god damn dimensions it is viewed in.
Now, the first thing I have to say is you all are not going to believe this story is true. But I swear, this story is 100% true. It is not an exaggeration in any way. It is true.
At the time, I had been a professor at this college for ten years and was on sabbatical. During this time, I decided to take a film class at the American Film Institute. You see, I used to spend a lot of time with filmmakers and artists, and the like, and I hadn't done that for a while, so I decided to take this film class now that I could devote the time to it.
It was a fantastic class. A lot of big name screenwriters came by. The writer of "Basic Instinct", the writer of "Deadpool", to name some. For the class we all wrote a trunk script, which is a script you carry around to show to studios and producers to try and sell. I wrote a script titled "Panama City," which is not relevant to the story. During the course of the class, I got to have coffee with film students and big name screenwriters, and such. Discussion of a screenplay called "Avatar" came up among screenwriters.
One day, the writer of "Deadpool" and another screenwriter friend of his came in and talked to us and I asked the screenwriter friend about this screenplay, "Avatar", and a hush came over the room. He went on to explain the premise of the screenplay which is this:
In this screenplay, there are pantheons of gods fighting a cosmic war, but because they have no understanding of war, there are fallen angels sent to Earth to recruit human military specialists and tacticians, and the like. A lot of this stuff is based on Plato's Temius, and the fallen angels have sunglasses to hide the light in their eyes.
It was never really explained how the recruitment worked. After this guy was done explaining the plot, the writer of "Deadpool" speaks up and says, "there's something else you should say... Avatar is an actual battleplan." This man said that "Avatar" was a master plan for gods disguised as a screenplay.
After that things just got really bizarre! There were all these discussions about "Avatar". "Who has Avatar?" You'd ask people about "Avatar" and they'd ask, "who told you about 'Avatar'?" People got more and more serious about it. You'd ask about "Avatar" they'd yell at you, "what, you want to get killed?!?" One day, I decided I was going to go try and find "Avatar". I walked through the parking lot later and people were hunched over pointing at me...
Well, many years passed by and I never heard a word about "Avatar". Then, about seven or eight years ago, I was having dinner with a good friend of mine, Stephanie Austin. She's a big producer; she produced "Terminator 2," I mean, she's that caliber of producer. Well, "Avatar" comes up in our conversation and it turns out that she knows the story and all about "Avatar." Furthermore, she buys into the "Avatar" theory, sheâ(TM)s in that whole circle. The last thing she says to me about "Avatar" is, "we know who has 'Avatar'â¦Cameron has it."
Now, I know Cameron and he is a really strange guy. I saw a lot of the filming of "T-2", and I talked to Cameron a lot. Let me tell you, Cameron is really loopy, he thinks all of the stuff he makes movies about is true. He once said, "I'm making a film about the truth." According to Austin, Cameron had had "Avatar" for a while, but he, "couldn't find the right actors for it."
Keep in mind, this "Avatar" thing isn't a heaven versus hell kind of thing, there are layers of heavens, like onions. Now, I used to go on avatar hunts with students, and sometimes we wouldn't find them, and sometimes we would. One time, we went to the Martini Bar on Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena and we found two female avatars. I swear, their eyes glowed. They looked like they had dropped out of heaven ten minutes ago. We talked to them for a while w
Remember, open source is free as in speech, not free as in bear.
3d films are great when they just use the 3d to provide texture.
Unfortunately, 3D filmmakers seem to think that they should ring all the bells and whistles and show off the 3Dness, so you end up with a mostly 2D film the 1D plot of which is designed primarily as an excuse to put in lots and lots of pointy things coming straight out of the screen at you, which is extra stupid, because pointy things coming right out at you is one of the things that current 3D technology is really bad at.
It was so bad, that in the TV-movie, "Beowulf," in the first five minutes you could tell it was supposed to be a 3D film, and in the rest of the film, every time you saw an axe, sword, scyth, or teeth, the first thing that goes through your head is "Sigh. That's going to come zooming out at me. For the love of [something] Please let them avoi..Oh, there it is."
Presuming Cameron does not make this mistake, his film could be quite interesting to look at.
When Christopher Columbus was trying to get funding for his expedition, he finally persuaded Queen Isabella and Ferdinand that the cost of three ships, provisions, crew pay all put together is less than what Her Majesty Q Isabella was spending to entertain visiting aristocratic guests for three weeks.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I partially disagree. The "old crop", i.e. very old, ala Quake, had some interesting properties the modern crop do not.
Quake I consider the first "true" 3D game because the tilt up and down were rendered in true 3D, whereas previous shooters like Duke Nukem, Doom, and Wolf 3D used a rendering trick that took out one of the matrix multiplications or something. This had the effect of reducing the rendering processor power needed (which was for 386 machines, with no hardware acceleration). But a side effect was you couldn't tilt up and down with proper rendering, though they did do a little distortion trick to simulate it, which got uglier the further you tilted.
Anyhoo, with the Quake software renderer (prior to the first Quake-capable 3D cards like 3dFX and, ultimately, Matrox PowerVR) you had a blocky scene, but with more CPU horsepower, you could get 60-70 fps, which was so smooth you lost any traces of stutter or flickering at the edges of notice. It became like looking through a window at a real world.
Nowadays you get that fast of an fps, but things just don't have that effect. And that's not including the immersion-breaking stutters as the system pages or loads a lot of new data into the card, or whatever, when you turn suddenly or a bunch of sparklies explode.
It's also possible the software/hardware/whatever cannot warp all the 3D triangles or whatever when you turn, at 70+ fps, even thought the hardware can render it that quickly. So you'd still get a kind of stutter as you turned even if the fps was through the roof. But I don't know enough about 3D programming anymore to know if this is an issue (wasn't this the T part of the "new" T&L cards 7 years ago or whatever?)
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
3D is just a gateway to harder dimensions. Just wait until you see your kids sitting on street corners with multicolored glasses on mainlining 4- and 5-D. Nothing less than the complete collapse of society as we know it is at stake.