Whirl

There was a moment, very early into James Cameron’s new film that I considered chucking my eleven dollars and walking out. It came in the form of a single word: “unobatainium”.

This was supposedly the name of the rare mineral we humans had traveled five light years to find. The word itself was so startlingly stupid that I laughed out loud. It destroyed any chance what-so-ever of enjoying the story.

But I didn’t walk out and I’m glad for it. The story didn’t get any better or less predictable, but the entertainment experience itself was mind boggling. This movie represents a baby step toward changes that will affect us all. And I’m not just referring to the obvious profound changes in how we experience entertainment. The movie also points to coming technological innovations that will alter the way we will perceive our world at every level. So here, in pretty raw form are 4 reasons you should go see this movie:

1. You Get To See A Scantily Clad Sigourney Weaver At 30

Sure she’s blue, eight foot tall, and has a six foot tail. And yes, the character is completely computer generated. Yet when you look at her face you know it’s Sigourney: her gestures, her facial expressions, her delivery—it’s all there. So if they can give us a giant blue Sigourney Weaver, what’s to say they can’t render her at 16? Or 5? Or 85?

The core of this capability is a technical process called performance capture. Boiled down to its’ basics there are really two things happening in the process. First, in the classical sense of movie-making, the director is composing a scene and his actors are performing it. But just as importantly he is also collecting data. Reams of it. And as we technologist know, data is expensive to collect but very, very cheap to keep.

With data in hand in the next 10 to 20 years the technology will likely advance to the level of performance re-purposing. Meaning that once a range of images, motions, expressions, and voices are captured for a given actor they can be stored indefinitely and used to generate different characters over and over again.

Think of it. Shoot the actor once, and then generate an infinite number of stories, characters and scenes using their original talent, all without ever engaging that person again. For an actor this technology represents a whole new range of thrilling creative challenges. For her agent it represents a whole new range legal nightmares. The future rights to use a person’s digital data will soon be far more important to an actor than the immediate gig.

Performance capture has already been used extensively in computer gaming, I can see it moving into movies and television as the quality goes up and cost of doing it come down. The last stage will be on a personal level. Perhaps you will be able to plug the actor of your choice into any story you like. Want to see a 20 something Denzel Washington cast with a young Katharine Hepburn? Go for it. In fact, watch it in 3D:

2. Avatar’s Take On 3D Is But A Stepping Stone

Digital experiences are becoming increasingly immersive. If you’ve ever gotten into a computer game you know this. But even the uninitiated have probably encountered a web experience so engaging they spent several minutes on it. Those of us in the business strive for this. Time on the site, or page, or application is one of our key metrics.

To make an experience immersive we want to engage as many of your senses as possible. Movies have always had an advantage in this because the size of the screen allows it to dominate our visual input. In the beginning it movies were only visual, then sound came in the mid 1920’s and both audio and visual technologies have improved ever sense. But an immersive visual 3D has experience has remained difficult until now.

The 3D you see today in Avatar is only the beginning, but it’s a really good start and certainly worth a taste. The next step will be to take it to 360 degrees—sights and sounds will be directional. We’ll see our movies in near complete sensory immersion. Initially we’ll do this with headsets and lots of graphical processing horsepower. The theater of the future may not even need a screen.

This may happen faster than you think. I’m in my early fifties and fully expect to see it. I’m less confident of seeing the next step in the process: complete immersion. But I’m completely sure my 25 year old son will experience it—should he elect to do so. It will be a tough decision for him, as elective brain surgery should be. Which brings me to reason 3:

3. The Brain To Computer Interface Represented In Avatar Already Exist

In the movie, which takes place 150 years from now, humans lay in a coffin like pod and control the biological bodies of genetically engineered beings with their thoughts. To some degree, this vision of the future is already outdated.

Some eight or nine years ago a cute little owl monkey named Belle sat in a laboratory at Duke University and moved a joystick left and right. This is not a particularly startling advancement for owl monkeys but it is for us. That’s because the joystick she moved was sitting in a room 600 miles away at MIT and the movement itself was controlled not by her body, but by her thoughts. Tiny electrodes implanted in her brain transmitted her commands directly to a robotic arm. Today this same technology is being used to operate computers for disabled humans. In the near future it will help amputees to control extremely advanced prosthetic arms (DARPA is working on this effort as we speak).

In forty years it could be very common to implant technology into the bodies of otherwise healthy people—even children—in order to enhance them. Human augmentation is a very real field with very practical outcomes. There are many credible scientist and engineers, like Ray Kurzweil, (seen here at TED, 2005) who view this as the next stage in human evolution.

This technology will enable us to live much longer, think much faster and remember virtually anything we experience. We’ll be able to access the internet with a thought. Learning will be via a direct port to the brain. All done wirelessly—like The Matrix but without that unsightly 60 pin cannon plug in the back of your head.

Kurzweil believes this technology will start yielding such results as early as the 2020’s. Even if it takes a few years longer it’s likely that 150 years from now the level of brain to brain connectivity will far exceed that pictured in Avatar. Thus my final point:

4. Humans Will Become Networked, Sentient Organisms

One of the so-called ‘discoveries’ in the Avatar storyline was the idea that all life on Pandora was connected through a biological network. Many people find this to be a silly and certainly it doesn’t seem likely with our biology. But it’s very likely with our technology. If you can connect your brain directly with a machine, then you can use said machine to connect your brain with another person, or many other persons.

We’re not talking mind control here (though it is a real danger), think of it more as Facebook on steroids. As you live through your day you will interact with people you know, both near and far, via thought. This doesn’t mean you will give up your physical life, though eventually that will be an option.

It sounds like a lot for one person to manage, but we are defiantly drawn to it and with the technology at hand I think we’ll adapt. People like Mark Pincus, founder of Zynga, have a pretty coherent vision of how this will play out over the next few years. We are rapidly evolving new social standards for connected behavior. And as the level of technological connectivity becomes more intimate, we will establish social norms for that as well.

We are entering a period in human technological evolution called ‘Convergence’ . We’ll will all hear this buzzword with increasing frequency over the next few years and it’s very likely we’ll grow tired of it very quickly. Convergence refers to the growing intertwining of four emerging branches of technology: Genetics, Robotics, Information and Nano (GRIN).

Once we pass through this phase, human reality will be very different from what it is today. In fact, physical reality will become increasing irrelevant. Avatar, both as a technological product and as entertainment, illustrates a few scenarios for how this convergence could play out.

I think it is important we begin to raise awareness of these advancements and to discuss the implications they hold. As I watched the ball drop over Time Square last week I was struck by how Dick Clark has finally begun to age. And I realized that if they can only keep his face alive for 10 more years, then we can digitally reanimate him. Then it’s Dick Clark, on demand, for the next 150 Rocking New Year’s Eve’s.

© 2010 by Rodney Gleghorn. All rights reserved.