Everyone wants to predict the future and everyone knows that there’s a 100% chance to get it wrong. Here is my go.
Avatar is probably the movie which will be remembered as the one to turn 3D at the movies mainstream. To shoot the flic, Cameron used a new, ground-breaking technology: The virtual camera.
A virtual camera is like a real camera but it allows the director to look at the final render of the scene while the actors perform in front of the green screen. It’s a cave to carry around. The next step will be goggles.
And after that: Goggles for viewers of the movie. Avatar showed a limitation of 3D: You can’t look around. As soon as you focus on something different than the virtual camera, you get a headache. So the next generation of cinemas won’t get a pre-rendered movie but the 3D scene data. The big screen will go. Everyone in the room will wear goggles which allow to see anything. Wonder what’s inside the waste basket in the lab? You might get a peek.
From that, it’ll be a small step from one-source movies to mass-edited movies. Producers will spread the raw scene data to movie centers and fans will get a chance to fix bloopers or even rewrite certain scenes. Eventually, everyone on the floor might see the same movie but in a very personal way.
Probably won’t take long for teenagers to figure out a way to hack the cloth transparency. Virtual character don’t sue.
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