Cameron as Future Avatar of Film Industry

For some months now, I've been touting "Avatar" as a good example of how the film industry should be concentrating on enhancing the experience of watching films *in the cinema* - something that no copied DVD can reproduce - thus making unauthorised copies pretty much into marketing devices that encourage people to go to the cinema for the full experience.

It seems that one person who gets this is James Cameron himself:

He said the music industry made a critical mistake by trying to stop piracy instead of innovating to give consumers new experiences that the industry could use to generate more money.

"The music industry saw it coming, they tried to stop it, and they got rolled over," he said. "Then they started suing everybody. And now it is what it is."

Instead, Cameron said he has tried to innovate to give movie goers a reason to go to theater. And in creating a rich, "reinvigorated cinema experience," Cameron said he discovered that people are willing to pay money to experience the same content in different ways. Not only are they willing to pay $10 or more to see Avatar on the big screen in 3D, but they also will pay to own the DVD and to take it with them on their phone or portable device.

"People are discriminating about the experience," he said. "They want to own it, have it on a iPhone when they want it, and they want the social experience of going to the cinema. These are really different experiences. And I think they can all co-exist in the same eco-system."

Cameron said the fact that people are still going to the theater to see Avatar now nearly four months after it was released supports his conclusion. He said he has had several discussions with the movie studio trying to figure out when to release the DVD of the movie. Typically DVD's are released after the film has left movie theaters. But he said since people are still going to see the movie in the theater, they decided to release the DVD next month with the movie still playing in some cinemas. The movie will also be available soon on iTunes.

What a perfect summary of what can be done, and what should be done. Let's hope Cameron is the future of cinema - at least in this respect.

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What Lies at the Heart of "Avatar"?

If nothing else, "Avatar" is a computational tour-de-force. Here are some details of the kit they used:

It takes a lot of data center horsepower to create the stunning visual effects behind blockbuster movies such as King Kong, X-Men, the Lord of the Rings trilogy and most recently, James Cameron’s $230 million Avatar. Tucked away in Wellington, New Zealand are the facilities where visual effects company Weta Digital renders the imaginary landscapes of Middle Earth and Pandora at a campus of studios, production facilities, soundstages and a purpose-built data center.

...

The Weta data center got a major hardware refresh and redesign in 2008 and now uses more than 4,000 HP BL2×220c blades (new BL2×220c G6 blades announced last month), 10 Gigabit Ethernet networking gear from Foundry and storage from BluArc and NetApp. The system now occupies spot 193 through 197 in the Top 500 list of the most powerful supercomputers.

Here's info about Weta from the Top500 site:

Site WETA Digital
System Family HP Cluster Platform 3000BL
System Model Cluster Platform 3000 BL 2x220
Computer Cluster Platform 3000 BL2x220, L54xx 2.5 Ghz, GigE
Vendor Hewlett-Packard
Application area Media
Installation Year 2009

Operating System Linux

Oh, look: Linux. Why am I not surprised...?

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OpenSim Update

Things are moving on with the open source virtual world based on Second Life, it seems:

Eager programmers had already begun open source work on the viewer in April of 2006, ahead of Linden’s move to formally put the viewer into the open source domain in January of this year. Now, as Linden Lab prepares to take the Second Life server code open source, the company is once again finding its timeline challenged by an open source community that doesn’t want to wait.

About 300 servers have installed Frisby’s open source Second Life server code, called OpenSim. DeepGrid, a network Frisby manages, has 20 OpenSim regions running on a near continual basis. While there’s no centralized inventory server, meaning that an avatar on DeepGrid can’t take objects from one region into another, users can cross region boundaries seamlessly, experiencing no disruption as their client connects to servers on opposite sides of the world. Another similar network, called OSGrid, connects ten regions.

Virtual Dosh: A Taxing Question

Here's the latest contribution to the (academic) debate about whether and in what circumstances virtual dosh should be taxed:

Although it seems intuitively the case that the person who auctions virtual property online for a living should be taxed on his or her earnings, or even that the player who occasionally sells a valuable item for real money should be taxed on the profits of those sales, what of the player who only accumulates items or virtual currency within a virtual world? Should the person whose avatar7 discovers or wins an item of value be taxed on the value of that item? And should a person who trades an item in-game with another player (for an item or virtual currency) be taxed on any increase in value of the item relinquished?

(Via Terra Nova.)

Second Life Goes Mobile

Software firm Comverse Technology has created an application that runs Second Life on Java-enabled mobile phones, along with other software that allows integrated SMS and instant messaging and the streaming of mobile video directly in-world.

Interesting. Even though it remains to be seen how smoothly this works, I think avatars actually fit with mobile phones quite well. Implementing Second Life in this way means that you can use your mobile as a kind of portable controller for yourself in the virtual world. If Second Life (or something like it) really takes off, it's easy to imagine extra features being added to make this kind of thing even easier.

Valleywag Goes Downhill

Sigh.

When I first came across Valleywag's rather narrow-minded attack on Anshe Chung recently, I assumed this was just the kind of editorial misjudgement that happens when publications aim to go beyond the usual pap served up by mainstream titles. As an ex-editor and ex-publisher, I can forgive this kind of thing.

But upon reading this subsequent story, entitled "Virtual world's supposed economy is 'a pyramid scheme'", I'm forced to conclude that Valleywag is simply desperate for attention and thinks that choosing a high-profile victim for its attacks will garner it some traffic (and it's correct, of course: after all, even I'm giving it some).

You can get the gist of the piece from the following:

What you're left with is lots of people putting USD in, and a small group taking those USD out, leaving the rest with no financial claims on anything - just an imaginatively sexy avatar.

Oh, yes, silly me: that's what Second Life's all about, isn't it? Putting money in to get money out. Forget about all that creativity or community stuff: after all, that's just reducible to an "imaginatively sexy avatar", right? (Via Slashdot)

Update: The Man in this sphere has spoken, and all is clear:

It's not a con game. It's a village-sized market. In fact it's a tourist attraction-type village: the big numbers of the people you see are one-time visitors. Newcomers are arriving in droves. Land speculation is rampant. But it's not thick; it's tiny. Not a ponzi scheme: a little mini gold rush.

Virtual Citizenship Association

Behold the Virtual Citizenship Association, a move from the people who tried to buy Ryzom:

We spend more and more time in online universes, talking with friends, playing, working, creating... Virtual societies are emerging everywhere, and are becoming more important every day. However, most of these universes are controlled by commercial companies, which isn't without causing a number of issues.

Decisions, impacting everyone's virtual life, can be taken against the interest of the world residents. Privacy and individual rights can be (and are!) easily dismissed, as nobody is looking over the shoulder of the local police - the world owners. Transparency and honesty are often a remote dream.

Our mission, as stated in the Social Contract, is to protect our elementary rights; living in a virtual world gives us the status of citizen there, and our rights have to be recognized and enforced.

Raph Koster, he of the Declaration of the Rights of Avatars, has his doubts.

Heading Towards 3D

Once this kind of thing becomes commonplace, there's no stopping the 3D wave. (Via TechCrunch.)

Avatar Liberation Movement

Interesting:

"Mii" avatars for the Wii console have been given a license to travel, thanks to a "How To" article published by LiquidIce's Nintendo Wii Hacks. Using the built-in Bluetooth capabilities of the Wiimote control device, a Bluetooth-capable PC, and a program called MiiTransfer, Mii avatar data can be scraped from the Wiimote to the PC, then shared through web sites such as the Mii Transfer Station (see the article for details).

I don't know if this is the first such case of avatar liberation, but it certainly won't be the last.