“The 3-D shows you a window into reality. The higher frame rate takes the glass out of the window. In fact, it is just reality.”

James Cameron on where he plans to take his Avatar movie franchise: To a bold, new frontier of a higher frame rate, rather than a bold new frontier of doing something other than a boring, high-budget version of FernGully, where the environment is ripped straight from Final Fantasy X and the Na’vi are actually the bad guys when you think about it. Yeah, I went there.

(via The A.V. Club)

LotRO Has A Bunch of Ridiculous Hats (Massively)

James Cameron + Cirque du Soleil Will = 3-D Movies (Hero Complex)

Side Table Made of Floating Cubes (RockPaperRobotFloat)

The Navy Tests a Mach 8 Railgun \m/ (Wired)

First Footage of Journey From the People Who Made Flow and Flower (GameInformer)

Fox Releases Synopsis for X-Men: First Class (ScreenRant)

Weta Builds Functioning Sentry Gun, Gives it to Valve (Kotaku)

(pic by The 1948 Time Machine, via Laughing Squid.)

Avatar director and pioneering submariner James Cameron has announced that he has signed a deal with Fox to direct both Avatar 2 and Avatar 3. The films are slated for release in December 2014 and December 2015, respectively.

Cameron’s statement:

It is a rare and remarkable opportunity when a filmmaker gets to build a fantasy world, and watch it grow, with the resources and partnership of a global media company. AVATAR was conceived as an epic work of fantasy – a world that audiences could visit, across all media platforms, and this moment marks the launch of the next phase of that world. With two new films on the drawing boards, my company and I are embarking on an epic journey with our partners at Twentieth Century Fox. Our goal is to meet and exceed the global audience’s expectations for the richness of AVATAR’s visual world and the power of the storytelling. In the second and third films, which will be self contained stories that also fulfill a greater story arc, we will not back off the throttle of AVATAR’s visual and emotional horsepower, and will continue to explore its themes and characters, which touched the hearts of audiences in all cultures around the world. I’m looking forward to returning to Pandora, a world where our imaginations can run wild.

No new word on plot or shooting details beyond what we’ve already heard.

(THR via Bleeding Cool)

James Cameron has been saying for a while now that he’s going to build a submarine and visit the bottom of the Mariana Trench, and now we know why.

Other than, you know, the thrill of discovery and being a part of the second team in history to do it, and the first in fifty years.

He’s going to take some stock footage for Avatar 2.

So director James Cameron isn’t going to crawl under a rock for another 13 years (the epoch that transpired between Titanic and Avatar): In March, he was spotted filming a “top secret outdoor concert” of the Black Eyed Peas to celebrate Samsung‘s 3D LED TV campaign launch, covered in not-so-top-secret depth by various blogs. Now, it appears, Cameron is on board to direct an entire 3D concert documentary for the Black Eyed Peas’ World Tour.

Band frontman will.i.am, not to be out done by Cameron’s “I’m the king of the world!” Titanic Oscar speech, told VIBE: “Right now, we are planning our 3D tour movie, and James Cameron is directing it – we have the biggest director, because we are the biggest group on the planet.”

NASA‘s next Mars rover, going by the name Curiosity, is nuclear powered and the size of a small car. If that weren’t enough to make you want to ride it around some kind of Weird-West-Martian hellscape, it’s also getting a set of 3D cameras courtesy of James Cameron.

Malin Space Science Systems had already delivered a set of cameras capable of taking high-def color video of both near and far objects, but NASA has provided the funding for Malin to work with Cameron to develop two 3D cameras with zoom lenses.

Read on...

Roger Ebert is one of the most beloved film writers of all time and, recently, as he’s bravely battled the effects of cancer and its treatment, the esteem people have for him has only gotten greater.

However, at the same time, he’s also been showing another side to his persona; a crotchety old man who refuses to acknowledge that video games could ever be considered an artform. While his views on video games are pretty indefensible (the computer animators who design the entire world and the writers who plot out the entire game aren’t artists?), there’s one area where his Luddite sensibilities are right on the money. In an article in the current Newsweek, Ebert claims that 3-D movies are nothing but a trashy gimmick whose only real purpose is to steal extra money from audiences and this writer, at least, thinks he’s 100% right.

It stands to reason that Alien, directed by Ridley Scott, is an icon in sci-fi — and horror — filmmaking. This isn’t your everyday, run-of-the-mill hyperbole; released in 1979, with Star Wars’ popularity only growing, it broke some serious ground and put Scott on the map. What it did, it did very well, from the slow, breathtaking shots in the darkness of space, to the singularly original design of H.R. Giger‘s Alien itself. I’d bet money that even those who never saw the film have heard the tagline, “In space, no one can hear you scream.”

And its influence can still be felt today. Although Scott wouldn’t stay on for the film’s three sequels (No one is counting the Alien vs. Predator series), Sigourney Weaver did, turning the protagonist Ellen Ripley into an archetypal sci-fi heroine. In 2002, it was inducted into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. And gaming owes a major debt to it, especially when you consider Samus Aran of Metroid fame.

So to hear that Ridley Scott is working on two Alien prequels — and in 3D no less — made me both a little excited and a little anxious.

When someone puts a general poll on the internet, we get Lara Croft Way and Computer Engineer Barbie; in other words, wonderful things happen.

In this spirit, we’d like to give you some links to the more than 2 dozen geeky and geek beloved people on this year’s list of 200 vying for a spot in an issue of Time through open internet poll. If it’s going to be mostly unscientific anyway, let’s tilt it in our favor!

Speaking at a press conference to hawk Avatar‘s upcoming Blu-Ray release, James Cameron revealed his disdain for watching his opus on screens not big enough to contain its majesty.

Avatar on the iPhone? Definitely no-go. On a laptop? Still pushing it.