James Cameron wants the Avatar sequels to look even more like reality
 

from io9. We come from the future.

I remember an interview with him where he talked about virtual reality becoming so much more fantastic than real life that people got totally absorbed in it.

He seemed to be quite happy with this, but I'd really be interested in hearing what he thinks this all might end up meaning for our kids and our kids' kids.

As in, will virtual reality stuff become so incredible/immersive and so easily attainable that people start to chose to live outside of the "real world" as much as they can? I guess some do that already but it's bound to start happening on a much larger scale.

Personally I'm not exactly upset about the sequels looking more real :) (and maybe this is only somewhat related to the actual topic) But I'm at least somewhat worried about where this could end up a few decades from now.

I'm not gonna take this whole "glass out of the window" thing seriously until I can walk onto the screen and onto Pandora. :P

Man, is this movie gonna be amazing to watch.

Necropost:

How about those holodecks :rolleyes: This is a topic I haven't really seen discussed seriously, and certainly not outside IRC.

Well, all I'm going to ask is, wouldn't that hurt your eyes considerably? :P

Maybe its the pessimist in me, but my first though after reading the title is: "Uncanny valley". Needless to say, I am really concerned about the Avatar sequels and have been since it became obvious there would be sequels.

That's long been discredited, and only ever applied to humans anyway.

What do you mean, "discredited?" It's a psychological phenomenon, not a specimen.

It has previously been presented as a universal forumla - yet in actual fact, it is demonstrably based on the quality of the production, otherwise, near-photorealistic paintings would supposedly be unviewable.

Yes, it is based on the quality of the production. The uncanny valley (as I understand it) states that we reject something when as it begins to look human except.... wrong. But as it continues to approach completely realistic, our displeasure at seeing it begins to diminish. That's probably not the best explanation, but its late.

http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pu...alleyChart.jpg

What I'm worried about is that Avatar is on the wrong side of that and that by adding to the realism, the Avatar sequels will find themselves in that dip.

Literally hundreds of alien species haven't, mainly ones that are humans with specific small modifications - by that pile of crap passed off as a theory, they should be universially hated..The Na'vi are already photorealistic, and were never intended to look human :P. If there was a real Na'vi, he might think they looked very slightly off, but people forget that it is applied to human perceptions of humans, not of sentients in general.

Well if the Hobbit is successful Cameron will be able to piggy back off that.

Also, for me at least, there were defiantly times that the Na'vi plunged down the uncanny valley.

THEY ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO LOOK HUMAN. Is that that hard to understand?

Even when it was still taken seriously, 'uncanny valley' applied to depictions intended to resemble humans (e.g. robots).

Uncanny valley applies to anything trying to look "real". As mentioned here in Greg Egan's review, there are a few times that his brain stopped accepting it as real due to flaws in the animation.

With the exception of the tails and ears, there is no animation. Just shows that random hipsters are not a good source, particularly since he makes numerous demonstrable factual errors.