By the year 2013, IMAX theaters and Kodak will bring digital theatrical projection to the next level with a single, exciting, futuristic-sounding concept: LASERS! The companies announced their partnership today in a statement promising advances in quality projection in large-scale IMAX and dome theaters in the coming years to benefit moviegoers, theaters, and investors. Win-win-win?
“This Kodak intellectual property is truly cutting edge,” said IMAX CEO Richard L. Gelfond in a press release today, “and will be used by IMAX’s esteemed Technology Group to enhance the cinematic experience for consumers, enable the application of digital technology in our larger and institutional theatres, and make being in business with IMAX even easier and more profitable.” IMAX is exclusively licensing over 50 Kodak laser and digital projection-related patents and technologies that promise to enhance the visual experience and light quality of the IMAX experience, as well as make content distribution within the IMAX network easier.
“Because this technology produces the deepest blacks, and the brightest 3D of any system demonstrated to date,” said Kim Snyder of Eastman Kodak Company, “it will truly make the movies more exciting for consumers, and that creates a strong value proposition for the studios and exhibitors as well.”
Meanwhile, Kodak has in recent years been developing laser projection technology, which previously fell under separate laser-specific regulations. In February, the company got the go-ahead from the FDA to bring their technology to cinema theaters (vs. specialized laser shows, etc.). According to Kodak’s website, the features of their Laser Projection Technology include combined 2-D and 3-D projection,” 3-D images “twice as bright” as those used in standard industry practice, and 2K resolution scalable to 4K. In a statement last spring, Kodak explained the initiative:
Typically, digital projection systems using high power lasers fall under the definition of a “demonstration laser” and must follow existing regulations for conventional laser projectors, such as those used in laser light show displays. Kodak has been working in conjunction with laser safety consultants and the FDA to address potential safety issues.
KODAK Laser Projection Technology promises to bring vastly improved image quality to theater screens, including significantly brighter 3D viewing, and to dramatically reduce costs to digital projection in cinemas through the innovative use of long-life lasers, lower-cost optics and more efficient energy usage.
Could lasers be the key to the future of theatrical moviegoing? Will it make the sucky peripheral IMAX seats you get when you arrive late suck any less? Would Jim Cameron approve? Stay tuned…
[Press release, Kodak]
But the experience has left some fans feeling sick, damp and pummeled after watching movies like Kung Fu Panda 2 and the latest Pirates of the Caribbean box-office hit.
A Korean company has built cinemas with seats which rock and special effects like wind, fog, strobe lights and scents are synchronised with the on-screen action.
Success in 4-D: Kung Fu Panda 2 with the voice of Jack Black as panda Po
The company, CJ 4DPlex, has opened an office in Los Angeles where computer programmes are written for the action films.
It plans to build America's first 4-D screen multiplex in New York and if it is a success, they will expand into Europe.
The biggest 4-D film in Seoul last week was Kung Fu Panda, the martial arts cartoon adventure with the voices of Jack Black, playing panda Po and Angelina Jolie.
A Korean blogger called Prof Miscreant reported in the Sunday Times: 'The seats have massage chair motors so that they punch you (lightly) in the kidneys or bottom when Po gets hit or falls down.
'At the end bubbles floated down from the ceiling to simulate fireworks - hilarious and well worth the 18,000 won (£10) ticket price.'
Blockbuster Avatar: Special 4-D audience effects were a huge hit with Korean movie fans
But not every movie fan is happy with the physical effects.
Some customers complained of feeling damp from the water effects after watching Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides but 'smelling sweet' like Captain Sparrow star Johnny Depp.
And there were reports of people becoming nauseous and going temporarily deaf after watching Transformers: Dark of the Moon where the major smell is the scent of burnt rubber.
CJ 4DPlex was the first company to make a 4-D version of James Cameron's 3-D futuristic blockbuster Avatar.
Audiences lapped up the smell of explosives and the howling wind effects so much so that the company is opening another three 4-D cinemas with seats that bend backwards and fly into the air.
A Seoul film distributor told Variety magazine: 'They are in a niche right now, like Imax giant screens a decade ago.'
After all the horror we are seeing these days, after the continuous bad news, I think it's time for some mind- and spirit-cleansing beauty. Something to remind us that humans and nature can sometimes produce awe-inspiring things. Like this video.
The Cassini spacecraft reached Saturn in 2004, sending the clearest images of the most striking planet in the Solar System. Working at home, Stephen Van Vuuren used those photos to create the most hypnotizing space film I've seen. There is no CGI and no 3D models in these images. Just images from NASA. Jump to 0:56 for the final result of his work, so far.
Stephen took the approach and orbit photos, painstakingly cropping, scaling, and putting them together in an IMAX-quality film. Tens of thousands 5,600,000-pixel video frames in full 32-bit natural color. He is still working on it. When he's done, I want to see this big. [Thanks Karl!]
I can understand 3D porn movies at home, but IMAX 3D porn? Who wants to sit through two hours of explicit 60-foot tall 3D sex scenes, no matter how engrossing the plot could be? With other people around, I mean.
But that's exactly what Stephen Shiu is proposing for his 3-D Sex & Zen: Extreme Ecstasy, the first IMAX 3D pornographic film. An erotic fantasia set in a subterranean sex lair from ancient china. It's based on a classic Chinese erotic story called The Carnal Prayer Mat, the tale of a man who meets a duke that introduces him to a world of luxurious orgies.
The director says that the $3 million film, which is being produced in Hong Kong using IMAX cameras, will be explicit:
The sex scenes are explicit and sometimes violent, but the main theme of the story is love. There will be many close-ups. It will look as if the actors are only a few centimeters from the audience.
He claims that people don't want "just erotica, they want some wow factor!" I think he may be right, but I don't know how many people would like to watch a gigantic penis waving in 3D a few centimeters from their faces. Anyway, at least the 3D glasses will also serve as protection.
Whatever happens with this, I really want him to set cameras in the IMAX theater, just to see the reactions of crowd. [Reuters]
Send an email to Jesus Diaz, the author of this post, at jesus@gizmodo.com.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I must confess at the outset a certain prejudice about Hubble 3D. I have known an astronaut who flew on shuttle missions STS-9 and STS-45. I have been at the Cape for several Shuttle launches and landings (including both the launch and tragic non-landing of STS-107, Columbia). I have sat in the shuttle simulator. I have heard Story Musgrave talk about his repair of Hubble in 1993. And, in a heartbeat, I would jump at an opportunity to be shot into space myself.
Also in the spirit of full disclosure, I have issues with what at times seems to be a gratuitous use of computer technology in the movies. Having been around for the old days of headache inducing 3-D, the current technological breakthrough is interesting. Avatar was interesting.
But, in IMAX 3-D, Hubble 3-D is a religious experience. It is hard to find fault with the 45-minute documentary that details the history of Hubble, its near abandonment, and its resurrection on more than one occasion. The IMAX format in conjunction with 3-D virtually places the viewer in the shuttle, thanks to the camera work of the astronauts and the guidance, from Earth, of director Toni Myers. Yet it’s not just the photographic technique. It’s the entire experience. It’s about being there.
The launch of STS-125 is shot from several vantage points. The visual impact of the flames and exhaust from the shuttle’s rocket engines has been photographed frequently. The experience of those images in IMAX 3-D in conjunction with the sound of those rockets captured by what the filmmakers have called ”sacrificial microphones” is, pardon the expression, awesome, as is the popping sound of the shuttle passing through maximum dynamic pressure.
After Hubble’s preventative maintenance by the crew of Atlantis, Leonardo DiCaprio takes the moviegoer for a tour of the Cosmos. Courtesy of Hubble, the telescope and virtual time machine, we get a view of the edge of the visual universe and celestial bodies whose visual emissions started their journey to Earth over 10 billion years ago, before Earth was formed. We peer through space dust to view both the destruction and creation of planets and stars. Courtesy of Hubble’s cameras – capable of rendering stars emitting light of various wavelengths that reflects their life-stages — we are presented with a far-reaching mosaic of the cosmos, an image threatening in its beauty to Van Gogh.
Hubble 3-D is a must see.
The film opens in IMAX and IMAX 3D theaters worldwide on March 19
Get a glimpse at the proprietary 2-D-to-3-D conversion software used to transform the opening sequence of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince in this video, supplied exclusively to Wired.com by IMAX.
The clip shows the process of creating Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: An IMAX 3D Experience, the special version of the boy wizard movie that features approximately 12 minutes of 3-D footage.
“The first step is masking out objects in the scene so that we can turn those objects 3-D,” says IMAX’s Eric Robinson as he shows off the software. “The next step is, re-create the scene in 3-D so that we can generate depth information from that. Our proprietary render system generates a new image, which is offset from the original.”
The promo video also shows supposed fans gushing about how the IMAX version is a “completely different experience” from the 2-D version shown in regular theaters, which we’ll have to take on faith.
Half-Blood Prince, a bona fide blockbuster that has raked in more than $755 million worldwide since its July 15 release, is the sixth film based on British author J. K. Rowling’s unbelievably successful Harry Potter novels. It has been critically acclaimed as one of the best of the lot.
Buy your tickets early (we're talking months, not days) because here are the 9 movies everyone needs to see in IMAX this year.
By: Premiere.com Staff
The Dark Knight/Warner Bros.
The Dark Knight January 23rd, 2009 If you didn't catch The Dark Knight in IMAX the first time around (or if you're hankering for another heart-stopping glimpse of Batman teetering on a window ledge), you can peep at it starting January 23rd as part of a For Your Consideration campaign. It's technically supposed to sway Oscar voters, but plenty of fans will be lining up again and again to see TDK on the really big screen.
Under the Sea IMAX 3D February 13, 2009 Jim Carrey narrates this 3D IMAX underwater adventure, which was directed, filmed, and produced by the folks behind 1994's Into the Deep. Under the Sea 3D was filmed with IMAX cameras, so if you want to go nose to snout with some creepy deep-sea critters in three glorious dimensions, here's your chance. Perhaps for Valentine's Day?
Watchmen/Warner Bros.
Watchmen March 6th, 2009 Another comic book juggernaut, Watchmen will be opening on both regular and IMAX screens this March if all the legal wrangling between Fox and WB is settled by then. Rest assured true comic book fanboys and fangirls will be buying up IMAX tix far in advance so they can see Dr. Manhattan in all his atomic glory.
Monsters vs. Aliens/DreamWorks
Monsters vs. Aliens IMAX 3D March 27th, 2009 The kids will love the monsters and aliens, but the adults will dig the subtle references to ‘50s sci-fi favorites (not to mention Stephen Colbert as a dim-witted Prez). Premiere.com got a peek at some of the footage, and it looks 3D-tastic, so we have no doubt it will be twice as tripped-out in IMAX.
Star Trek May 8th, 2009 The highly anticipated (and scrutinized) 2009 upgrade to Star Trek will give director J.J. Abrams the chance to show off his talent for spectacle on an interstellar level. Whether or not you agree with the casting choices, the Romulans' hairstyles, or William Shatner's cameo controversy, you have to admit the possibility of seeing the USS Enterprise in IMAX is epic.
Night at the Museum: Battle at the Smithsonian May 22, 2009 The first Night at the Museum pulled in an impressive haul of over $251M domestic, thanks, no doubt, to its fam-friendly premise – what better way to quiet the peanut gallery than mesmerize them with a gigantic screen full of dinosaur bones rattling to life? Battle at the Smithsonian promises more historical hijinks and cool cameos from folks like Amy Adams as Amelia Earhart and Bill Hader as General Custer.
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen June 26, 2008 It goes without saying that anything Michael Bay puts on the big screen will have enough explosions to make robot fans squeal. According to rumors, at least 3 scenes will be filmed specifically for IMAX screens, so you folks who hit the regular theaters will be missing out on some blow-‘em'-up fun.
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince/Warner Bros.
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: IMAX 3D July 17, 2009 You can see Harry and his buddies play Quidditch and fall in lurve in two dimensions, or you can see it all on an IMAX screen, with specific scenes shot in 3D. There's no telling which ones, but we're hoping they involve close-ups of Voldemort's nostrils!
James Cameron's Avatar IMAX 3D December 18, 2009 James Cameron has been talking about and working on Avatar since 1995, so it's no wonder that this is one of the most hyped films of 2009. Combining live humans and sets, green screen, CGI, and 3D cameras developed by James Cameron and frequent Cameron collab Vince Pace, Avatar might very well knock our collective socks off.
Last week, CNN's attempt to display the future of TV news ended up making 3D look like the gimmick that it is. Yep, 3D is a gimmick, most associated (outside of CNN) with those stupid glasses designed to fit Blockheads from Venus. But as you know, there are many different scientific approaches dedicated to tricking you into thinking bullets—or other deadly projectiles such as children—are popping out of the screen and coming right at you. Here's a quick and dirty guide to 3D magic.
Most 3D operates on a single basic principle—tricking our dumb, binocular brain into interpreting a 2D image into one with depth. The most basic way to do this is stereoscopy, which is essentially showing a slightly different image to each eye which the brain mashes together into a 3D image. We've broken up the million different ways to do 3D in a few broad categories.
Stupid Glasses It's easiest to do stereoscopic images with glasses or other nerdtastic eyewear to change how you see stuff—hence there are a lot of variations in 3D glasses tech. • An anaglyph image is the old school 3D we all know and got headaches from: An image has two different color layers, one for each eye, with slightly different perspectives and when we look at them through those awesome plastic glasses (usually with red and blue lenses) that block one layer in each eye, our dumb brain takes the resulting separate image from each eye and mashes them together to make a 3D scene in our head.
• Polarized 3D glasses are the more modern choice for cheap 3D for the masses—you've worn them at IMAX if you've caught a 3D movie there, or at Disney World, since the big thing they allow over an anaglyph is full color. They work kind of the same way as the red/blue glasses though—two synced projectors throw images with slightly different perspectives up simultaneously, but at different polarizations. The polarized glasses only allow a single corresponding polarized image into each eye, and the brain does the hard work again, combining two separate images into a single 3D one.
•The Pulfrich effect is a brain bug where side-to-side motion is interpreted to have some depth when there's a slight sync lag between your eyes. A set of glasses with a dark lens over one eye will make this happen, so when something moves from left to right, it'll look like it's moving back or forward—you know, in 3D. It's been used for the Super Bowl and Married with Children, since the glasses are so cheap. [Thanks David!]
•ChromaDepth is perhaps the fanciest glasses tech using micro-prisms and whatnot (hello red and blue again), but all it essentially does is slightly shift the way colors are perceived in each eye, so they see different things and boom, 3D. The major limitation of the tech is that if you change the color of an object, you also change how its depth is perceived, since it's all based on color. (Check out the video above, done in ChromaDepth, to see what I mean.) [Thanks David!]
• LCD shutter glasses are excellent because they're so ridiculous. They actually block vision alternately in each eye in time with the refresh rate on the display by rapidly darkening each lens, while the display alternately shows images with a slightly different perspective (this is called alternate frame sequencing). It's essentially the "show different stuff to each eye" principle taken to its logically absurd conclusion—literally blocking the sight of the unwanted eye. Yes, these complicated puppies usually run over $100 (or way more, even), and can give you a headache on a monitor without a high enough refresh rate.
No Glasses Required Okay, so you don't wanna wear glasses. No problem—you just move the one-image-per-eye dance to the display itself. • A parallax barrier is one of the more popular ways for swinging 3D without glasses—you see it in Sharp TVs for instance. It actually works a lot like polarized glasses, it just moves where the obstruction magic happens to the front of the TV. Instead of having glasses filter the image for each eye, the screen's parallax barrier—think of it is a very finely grated fence with precisely angled holes—directs different light into each eye, and your brain turns the mixed signals into a 3D image. The bad part? With a normal parallax barrier, the screen is permanently in 3D mode and you don't have exactly have a wide viewing angle. Sharp's trick for 3D in LCD displays is fancier—there's a second LCD that creates the parallax barrier with a polarized grid of lines, which is nice because you can turn it off and go back to regular 3D viewing.
• Integral Imaging is a form of parallax actually. You've got a bunch of supertiny micro-images that you actually peep through an array of spherical convex lenses, one per micro-image. All these micro-images come together when you look at them to form a 3D image.
• Another form of parallax is continuous-motion parallax. Here, HoloVizio's system dumps pixels in favor of voxels, which can project multiple light beams in multiple directions simultaneously.
3D in 3D So far, we've just talked about 2D images on a flat screen, which your brain is fooled into thinking are three-dimensional. The other side is creating images in real 3D— you know, meatspace. Still, most of them make use of lighting and projection tricks too. • The Graphics Lab at the University of Southern California has come up with a cheap way to create images in 3D space (as opposed to planar space) by using a spinning mirror called a light-field display. Basically high speed video is projected onto a quickly spinning mirror, which then "reflects a different and accurate image to each potential viewer." The system uses an algorithm to figure out the correct shading and occlusion for the image.
• Japanese researchers' new plasma-laser hologrammy device takes advantage of the "plasma emission phenomenon near the focal point of focused laser light." By manipulating the laser's focal point, along the x, y and z axes, they can display real 3D images in mid-air.
• Heliodisplay actually creates a surface in mid-air to project an image onto, which allows you to do the "Help me Obi-wan Kenobi" type of floating holograms that look 3Dish, though they're actually planar (2D) images. Yep, it's expensive.
FAKE FAKE FAKE There are lots of suggested 3D images out there that aren't any kind of real 3D—videogames are of course the most obvious. But why pick on them when you can pick on CNN? • Sorry Wolf, but we gotta hit people with the truth: CNN's "holograms" are totally fake. We already explained this before, but no one was projected in front of Wolf Blitzer. He was looking at a wall. What we saw at home as computer-generated: A bunch of HD cameras filmed the hologramee from all sides, computers crunched that data and delivered whatever angle the studio camera needed at the time. As long as the source angle was synced to the studio angle, it looked, to viewers at least, like a 3D "hologram." Nice try, Wolfie. Call us when you score an R2 unit. –With Reporting by Seung Lee. Post updated with two additional 3D technologies.
.
All you art collectors out there. Here is a chance to get a Giclee copy of some of Ian M Sherwin work. Ian is planning on doing a whole series of Marblehead, Massachusetts paintings. His work is amazing.
By the year 2013, IMAX theaters and Kodak will bring digital theatrical projection to the next level with a single, exciting, futuristic-sounding concept: LASERS! The companies announced their partnership today in a statement promising advances in quality projection in large-scale IMAX and dome theaters in the coming years to benefit moviegoers, theaters, and investors. Win-win-win?
After all the 
• An 
• 
•
• LCD shutter glasses are excellent because 
• A parallax barrier is one of the more popular ways for swinging 3D without glasses—you 
• Integral Imaging is a 
• The Graphics Lab at the University of Southern California has come up with a cheap way to create images in 3D space (as opposed to planar space) by using a spinning mirror 
• 
.
Posts
