Avatar is Only the Beginning

The name aside, the iPad represents something perhaps more profound.  It wasn't that long ago that an internal single gigabyte hard drive cost well over 4000K, and you had to insert a 'boot-up' disk in order to run anything.  I'm not that old and I can vividly recall a time before the Internet, a fact my future children will chide me for I'm sure.  Yes I am well aware that Apple isn't the first company to produce a tablet computer, but lets face it Apple takes things to another level of design, use, integration and coolness.  Already periodical publishing companies are lining up to get their subscriber based content fed through it.  Will it be their savior, only times will tell, but I'm getting away from myself.  At the same time Apple was developing this device, which I'm sure has been in the works for years, a director by the name of James Cameron was developing the technology to bring his latest piece to the screen.  Spending millions he developed the most complex 3D production equipment to date, and if worldwide sales are any indication people love it.  3D isn't new, but the quality has vastly improved from the early beginnings decades ago.  And with Sony and Panasonic announcing a line of home 3D television sets, ready for shipment sometime this year, is this the way media is headed.  I wonder how a 3D photography gallery would fare.  When you walk in you're handed glasses, like the ones you're given in the theater today, and wander huge three dimensional pieces that jump off the wall at you, as if you're walking through a desert sunrise or a Yosemite snowstorm.  Attached to these glasses could be earphones with digital recordings made by the photographer at the moment of capture, to transport you even deeper into the environment, losing yourself in the 3 dimensional beauty.  Or perhaps one step further, since motion capture and still capture are now being produced via the same devices, each frame is a moving 3D landscape, with sound.  Fantastical, perhaps, but not very far off.  If the point of landscape art is to transport your viewer, this scenario seems like a sure way to get them deeper into your creative.  And for me, if BW could be produced this way, what an experience that would be.  I'm very excited about these things, very different than whats come before.  With technology changing as fast as it is, who knows what Avatar has started, all I know is it's only the beginning.