The person who goes
to a movie today has pretty much the same experience that movie
viewers had 74 years ago when The Wizard of Oz was made. But
technology may cause some big changes in the motion picture game.
Let's look at some coming attractions in the cinema (pun intended).
CGI
Characters Indistinguishable From Humans
CGI stands for
computer-generated imagery. CGI is widely used for special effects,
and also for generating onscreen characters. Movies such as Toy
Story, Shrek, and Finding Nemo use CGI for creating
onscreen human and animal characters. As software and hardware power
advances, before long we will probably see CGI representations of
humans that are indistinguishable from photography of actual humans.
You may see a movie in which the male romantic lead is human, the
female romantic lead is human, and the meddlesome father is computer
generated. We are almost there already. In the Lord of the Rings
movie trilogy and the recent Star Wars prequel trilogy there
were important characters who were entirely computer generated, and
who blend with humans. The characters had unusual anatomies that made
them distinguishable from humans, but before long you will probably
leave a movie asking yourself: which of the lead roles were played by
humans?
Augmented
Reality Movies
The idea behind
augmented reality is that you see basically what you would see
without a computer's help, plus you also see some additional things
that are created by computer software. An example of augmented
reality would be: you are wearing something like Google glasses, and
you walk by a store. Suddenly you see floating in the air some
glowing ghostly signs that say “Save 50% here!” The sign images
are sent to your glasses as part of the augmented reality. Someone
not wearing the glasses could not see the glowing signs.
This type of
technology could be integrated into a movie experience. Theater goers
could be given special glasses to wear (or there would simply be
augmented reality that works for anyone who is wearing Google glasses
or a similar system). Then at certain points in the movie, you might
literally see things bursting out of the screen. For example, when a
spaceship explodes in the movie, you might see fragments seeming to
fly out of the movie screen. Or when a house catches on fire in the
movie, you might see crackling flames flying out of the movie screen.
The things that would seem to fly out of the movie screen would be
the software-generated augmented reality projected onto your glasses.
Electrode
Enhanced Movies
Movie directors use
music to manipulate the emotions of viewers. You will feel sadder
when watching a tragic scene in a tearjerker movie if the background
music has sad, slow violin music, just as you will feel more
enthralled listening to blaring trumpets during the exciting climax
of a movie. But there is perhaps a more efficient way to manipulate
the emotions: electrical stimulation of the brain. Scientists have
shown that different emotions can be generated by attaching
electrodes to the brain, and sending in electrical currents to
specific regions of the brain.
Credit: J. Contreras-Vidal/University of Maryland
We can therefore
imagine a new type of movie in the near future: what could be called
an electrode movie. Upon entering the motion picture theater, you
would take your seat, and place a skull cap over your head, a cap
with many electrodes leading to a computer next to your seat. At
appropriate points in the movie, electrical impulses would be sent to
specific parts of your brain. At that tearjerker moment when the hero
dies on the battlefield clutching his sweet fiancee's picture, an
electrical current would be sent to all the skull caps, causing the
entire audience to cry like babies. When the happy ending arrived,
another electrical current would be sent to a different part of the
brain that might cause the audience to feel such joy that when the
movie ended, the audience would seem happier than a bunch of kids
splashing in a water park on a scorching summer day.
Electrical
stimulation of the supplementary sensorimotor area has
been shown to produce laughter.
We can only imagine how such a possibility could be exploited by
movie makers. At any point in the movie that was supposed to be
funny, a little electrical current would be sent to the skull caps of
the audience members, triggering laughter. Even the weakest comedy
script might have the audience rolling on the floor with laughter.
Movies
Made With Sensation Recorders
In
the classic novel Brave
New World
Aldous Huxley imagined a type of movie called a Feelie which engages
the sense of touch as well as the senses of sight and hearing. We can
take this idea a little further and imagine a type of movie in which
you see, smell, taste, hear, and feel everything that the protagonist
is seeing, smelling, tasting, hearing, and feeling.
Such
a movie could probably be experienced only by someone who had an
implant in his brain, one allowing a flow of sensations that would
override the normal flow of sensations from a person's eyes, ears,
nose, and skin. But there might be various other reasons why people
of the future might have a brain implant, so this type of movie might
work with a standard brain implant that had been created mainly for
other purposes such as accelerated education.
To
make this type of movie, producers might use a technology that could
be called a sensation recorder. A sensation recorder would be kind of
like a video recorder that records all of your sensations at once:
everything you see, hear, smell, taste, touch, and feel.
Such
a sensation recorder might work like this: imagine you are a young
man making a tourist trip to New York City with a beautiful young
woman. Whenever you had some pleasurable sight, sound, smell, taste,
or feeling, you would turn on your sensation recorder. So you would
make sure to turn on your sensation recorder when you got to the top
of the Empire State Building. But you would turn the sensation
recorder off during the boring wait in line before you got to the
top. If you then had a delicious meal at a great restaurant, you
would turn on your sensation recorder, but only when you were eating
the best parts of the meal. Unless you were making a family movie,
you might turn on your sensation recorder when things heated up with
your date (assuming you had her permission).
Movie
viewers could then experience a Feelie type of movie, in which they
experienced in two hours all of the best sights, sounds, tastes,
smells, and touch sensations of your trip to New York City. To watch
the movie, a viewer might need to plug a wire into his brain,
connecting with a brain implant added earlier.
One
can only imagine how vivid such movies would be. For example, if the
plot involved the hero escaping a fire, you might actually feel the
heat of the flames as you watched the movie. Whenever the movie's
hero plunged into water, you would feel the same sensation of water
splashing on to your skin. Once you started experiencing such
movies, you might ask: how did people get by watching movies with
only sights and sounds?
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