Avatar - A new Era of Cinema begins

EscapeArtist

unobtainium

Larry Niven's 'Ringworld'

I knew it! I'm a big Ringworld fan, so I definitely came across that term at some point. OT: I tried modeling the Ring. Not possible on this desktop!

TIG

'Unobtainium' was also the very material they use to make the drilling-machine in 'The Core' [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL7ljBKqJdw ] - as it must withstand temperatures and pressures beyond imagining...

boofredlay

Add me to the fan list of 'Ringworld' too Jeff.

Cyberdactyl

Hehe....reading Ringworld's Children at the moment as a matter of fact.

I read RW back in the 70's and was awe-stricken as a young teen. As a matter of fact, it was probably Niven's works that pushed me to physics and engineering. Niven has an uncanny ability to visualize worlds that are at least somewhat plausible with the given technology.

Speaking of Avatar and Niven. I saw it in an IMAX-3D in Raleigh, NC over the new year weekend and was stunned at the beauty like everyone else.

BUT, it made me think of a Niven book as I was watching it, and that was The Integral Trees. If you love Niven's imagination, you will love the book. Like Avatar, Niven's early books before teaming with Pournelle were never overly ambitious with story telling as he leaned more for how fantastic tech and environments effected people or aliens. The comparison of Integral Trees. . .with the 9 foot 'humans', the insanely large "floating" trees, all in zero g (somewhat like the floating mountains) made me wish SO much Cameron had chosen Niven's book for his project instead.

watkins

Dear All,

I became hooked on science fiction as a teenager, little realising that one day I would end up working on space instrumentation. Notwithstanding the 'off-world laws of physics', I thoroughly enjoyed Avatar and would happily go see it again. Ring World would indeed make a great film, as would some of the works of Peter Hamilton, a British science fiction writer of the first water (http://www.peterfhamilton.co.uk/).

Regards,
Bob

EscapeArtist

Just finished re-reading "The Ringworld Throne" the other day, I'm starting to collect all the old Sci-Fi books I read as a kid - from Niven to Asimov. I'll have to look for "Integral Trees".

But, back to Avatar, I just saw this on FailBlog and thought it was funny:

Ecuadorian

Stereoscopic stuff (aka "3D") has also been big in the Consumer Electronics Show this week. It seems the PlayStation 3 will have some stereoscopic games in the future, and that stereoscopic Blu-ray movies are coming, too.

So... who's getting a Sony "3D" TV this summer with accompanying glasses?

Chris Fullmer

Sony had Fromfonts show off their 3d TV at the AIA show a few months ago. They used it on Google Earth. It was cool to see Google Earth in 3d on a big TV. I don't think I'll be spending money on it anytime soon though.

kwistenbiebel

Ummmmpf.....One of the directors in our firm saw the movie with his daughter and just asked me if we can do stereoscopic views of architectural projects for presentations. The idea is actually quite thrilling
Could we do that with some Sketchup plugin?.....

BTM

@kwistenbiebel said:

Ummmmpf.....One of the directors in our firm saw the movie with his daughter and just asked me if we can do stereoscopic views of architectural projects for presentations. The idea is actually quite thrilling
Could we do that with some Sketchup plugin?.....

You could get a plugin that exports 2 images of the camera that would be offset as a person's eyes would, but as for color changes and mixing the images together, I doubt it would be possible.

solo

You can do it with Vue, there is a tutorial on how it's done at Geekatplay, it renders with two cameras.

Gaieus

You can do it with Walkabout3D
http://www.walkabout3d.com/

It also works fine with LightUp now.

Simmetry3D (the more serious version) can also do it:
http://www.simmetry3d.com/

As for the plugin for those images - if there were one, that would be cool. I saw a nice app (free!) that could convert photos taken like that into these images (I can't remember now but I am sure I could find it). Now if you render a scene nicely and then put these images together, that would be cool...

These are not motion pictures however.

Ecuadorian

You can produce stereoscopic images with any renderer; you just need to render two views, one for each eye, and then join them with an anaglyph maker. There's a free one here:
http://www.stereoeye.jp/software/index_e.html
In that site there are also links to online vendors of anaglyph Red/Cyan glasses.

Head-ache inducing anaglyph technology won't look nearly as nice as the stereo effect in Avatar, but you can do it with any monitor.