I just got tickets for Avatar at the IMAX.  WooHoo!  I’ve been dying to see it in 3D, this is even better!

I love SciFi.  More than anything.  Genre-wise, anyway.

————

How ‘Avatar’ May Predict the Future of Virtual Worlds
CNet (01/24/10) Terdiman, Daniel

The technology James Cameron and his team developed for the film “Avatar” may provide a sneak peek of the future direction that three-dimensional (3D) virtual worlds will take.

The movie’s breakthrough is a camera system that captures live footage of actors and instantly integrates them within virtual environments. Some experts speculate that it and other augmented reality tools will form a core technology for mainstream 3D virtual world interaction.

“It will get more sophisticated when whole worlds are mapped onto the sim-reality complete with avatars–other people–and bots,” predicts expert Bruce Damer.

Jerry Paffendorf, who helped organize the Accelerating Studies Foundation’s Metaverse Roadmap report, expects that the world will eventually be fully immersed within real-time graphical overlays. He says this virtual world evolution is in a nascent stage, incarnated in the prevalence of augmented reality applications “that let you look through the camera to see things that aren’t physically there: Either data overlays like directions or where tweets are coming from or a digital doggy prancing on your kitchen counter.”

“Avatar” producer Jon Landau says the virtual production technology invented for the film will eventually become a consumer technology. He envisions people using it to recor