Avatar

Quite amazing. My favourite part must have been the fluorescent 3D forest plants! Oh, and the 'mother three'. Sad about the to-much-action-film-style-explosions at the end though. :/

Some good points in your article. The Avatar movie seems quite a bit more clever than some give it credit for - and the treatment of Jake's transformation (and the audiences) is a case in point. The audience joins Jake in his dreamlike transformation into his new form. (Witness his surreal introduction to the bioluminescent night on Pandora - I believe this is symbolic of a sharmanic journey.) The audience too is bombarded by this extreme feeling of "otherness". As Jake starts to take his new form seriously, he begins to learn, and the world around him solidifies. It's only when he starts taking his experience seriously that he begins to evolve. I think the virtual avatar experience is somewhat similar. It can seem frivolous and detatched from reality at first - but the experience you have in that alternate reality is real experience. The more you allow yourself to forget the strangeness, the more you get out of it. Perhaps the most profound thing James Cameron did in producing Avatar is walk the talk. Technology was developed to let the actors act using avatars of their CGI selves - providing immediate visual feedback of their performances. This allows the actors to better inhabit their virtual roles, and this qualitative improvement of experience for the actors is reflected in convincing performances by the CGI characters. Consumer level immersive environments have a long way to go before they reach the level of Avatar. Still they exhibit some of the strengths of the medium; their worth in education, entertainment, modelling are now being realised. It seems society is learning to accept this value isn't such a fringe proposition; an interest which is shown by Avatar displacing Titanic the largest grossing movie of all time.