Granted, I make this assertion not as one of those folks who saw the movie in the last day, just as someone who has seen the early footage from Comic Con and Avatar Day and the other clips released so far.

An interesting thing about seeing the footage at Comic Con: hours before the audience's first trip to Pandora, we got to see another 3D motion capture preview, scenes from Robert Zemeckis' A Christmas Carol. You can almost see the gears turning in Zemeckis' head when he introduces a new movie, the tweaks he made to try to improve his particular brand of mo-cap aided animation. Casting Jim Carrey, a man famous for being able to act beneath five pounds of makeup, in multiple roles was an inspired attempt to remedy the notorious flatness of his animated characters. But it proved impossible to forget that these characters were simply sophisticated digital puppets, with Ebenezer Scrooge nearly as ethereal as the ghosts he's scheduled to encounter.

While watching the Avatar footage, by contrast, it was so easy I was watching an animated movie. Certainly it's jarring to see a giant blue person standing next to humans when Sully is first connected to his Avatar body. But when the Na'vi step into their animated native habitat, it's easy to suspend that disbelief that so stubbornly hangs over Zemeckis' animation. Pandora and the Na'vi may be shy of photorealistic (although there are some incredible moments, especially during the Thanator chase and when Jake engages with his Banshee for the first time), but they do feel alive, the way their facial muscles move, the sometimes distracting way their ears twitch to convey emotion, the play of light in their eyes. At times, it almost looks like we're seeing actors in blue makeup rather than the motion capture mask. Cameron has very nearly crossed the uncanny valley and that's an achievement in itself.

But it's Pandora itself that's truly thrilling, thanks to a combination of multilayered 3D technology and Cameron's obsessive nature. Cameron has talked a great deal about how he and his army of concept artists and biologists designed every plant and creature on Pandora. It's an impressive feat (and I can't wait to see that bioluminescence again), but it's only a small component of what makes the planet seem real. Early viewers are describing Avatar as akin to a nature documentary on an alien world, and it goes far beyond glowing flora. When a Banshee lands on a tree or a Thanator runs through the forest, leaves fall. If a creature pounces on a stalk or branch, it splinters. These aren't small details Cameron and his team have inserted for the sake of realism; they're present throughout the early clips. More than that, in 3D, these components exist on different planes, each obeying the laws of physics independent of the others. When Sully first encounters Neytiri, the air is simply stuffed with bugs, embers, and bits of dust, and their depth is such that you imagine you could stick your hand in it and swirl it around. I've been fairly 3D-agnostic until this point; I enjoy the novelty of movies where the 3D reaches out and grabs you, but I've never found it adds much to the experience. Avatar's 3D, which pulls you in instead of reaching out, does create a special experience, that sense that you are actually present, looking inside an entirely invented world.

However, the technology, as amazing as it is, leaves us with a lot of questions. Is there a point to all this spectacle? Is this good filmmaking? Avatar is antithetical to the Hitchcockian mode of filmmaking, where the director carefully controls the audience's gaze. In Avatar, Cameron gleefully surrenders that kind of control, inviting us instead to look all over the screen and try to drink in as much as humanly possible as we go along. In fact, I imagine that a good deal of Avatar's repeat business will come from a sense that viewers missed a lot the first time around. I haven't seen the film in its entirety yet, but I can't help but wonder if all that spectacle distracts from other aspects of the movie. And, if it works well with Cameron's particular brand of filmmaking, will it work equally well with others'?

As for its purpose, Cameron has set it to worldbuilding — and the idea that you can create a global, digital set that you can return to any time. And you can extrapolate big things from that — incredibly detailed video games, franchises set and filmed on many worlds by many filmmakers. But it's important to remember that Cameron and his team built this technology as they went along. Early reviews indicate that Avatar stands up as a movie on its own, but it's also a proof of concept. I can't imagine that Cameron has found the exhaustive — or even the best — uses for his remarkable motion capture and animation technologies. I would love to see what happens when this technology lands in the hands of someone whose craft is animation. Avatar itself might not change all movies forever, but I'll wager that the technology that birthed it will give rise to something wonderful — and stranger than we could have imagined before.

Cameron has promised us that Avatar represents a huge technological advancement, a blending of real-world performances and imagination that will transport us to the foreign world of Pandora in an immersive, visceral way. But developers of medical technologies are looking to achieve the same sort of experience with the world we have, and the entertainment industry's advances in image capture and graphics processing are paving the way.

Certainly medicine is no stranger to computer animation, something they have long used to explain concepts and train personnel. And motion capture has been used for years in gait analysis. Physiotherapists often film patients wearing reflective motion capture markers to analyze their gait, in much the way that filmmakers use motion capture markers on their actors.

But the demand for improved computer graphics technology graphics from the entertainment industry means more sophisticated applications in medicine as well. Just this fall, Nvidia, which develops graphics processing technology for, among other things, gaming systems, demonstrated how the technology used to create immersive 3D experiences for games can also create immersive experiences of the human body. Along with Siemens Healthcare, Nvidia has developed an ultrasound viewing experience that sounds like it was scripted by Cameron: parents and healthcare workers can put on a pair of stereoscopic glasses and examine a fetus as if they were looking directly inside the womb. The demonstration comes just months after Nvida released its GeForce 3D Vision system, with a pair of stereoscopic glasses to improve the immersive experience of playing video games and watching 3D movies.

For filmmakers like Cameron, the goal is to capture the detail of the human experience, down to the most minute muscle movements and to create worlds that are so detailed as to appear real. If he's successful in creating an experience with Avatar that gives audiences both a fully immersive experience of a world that's completely invented and manages to translate the twitches of the human face onto an animated alien, imagine what his technology could accomplish when simply reflecting a world that actually exists. Perhaps the legacy of Cameron, Zemeckis, and other filmmakers working in these fields will include advances in virtual surgery, diagnosis, and other innovations in the medical field.

This isn't a poll about which CGI creature looks the coolest - instead, we're aiming at which one felt the most like an actual character in the movie. In other words, which one made you forget you were watching CGI? Which stirred up your sympathy?

Since the earliest days of cinema, special effects have been crucial to movie storytelling. One of the earliest popular short movies, Jacques Méliès' 1902 La Voyage Dans La Lune, was a science fiction story with special effects.

All these effects were created by human hands. In the mid-twentieth century filmmakers like Jean Cocteau started to perfect the art of using film technology to create special effects. In Orphée, for example, he used double exposures and ran the film backwards to do his special effects. Here is a great moment where Orpheus goes through the looking glass into another world.

Meanwhile, back in the states, special effects masters like Ray Harryhausen were using good, old-fashioned elbow grease and stop-motion techniques to build amazing monsters whose movements had a lifelike feel even though they were fantastical. Here's a great compilation of claymation monsters from Harryhausen, from the 1930s through the 80s.

But these days, computers are making special effects for the humblest of straight-to-DVD movies and television series, to Hollywood blockbusters. We have films like District 9 and Lord of the Rings where major characters are a combination of human and computer-generated. And of course battle sequences in movies like 300 are fought almost entirely by CGI people, not actors. Has this changed the way we tell stories? Absolutely.

Computer-assisted filmmaking has allowed amateur filmmakers, or people with small budgets, to produce movies that have the kind of outer-space effects that once required a team of prop designers. Of course some of this CGI looks terrible, but a lot of it is terrific and funny. Exhibit A is this CGI test from the Z-grade flick Chihuanhas.

And of course, people who make fan videos have many more resources at their fingertips, thanks to CGI. Check out this great fan-made snippet of an idea for revamping a familiar Doctor Who story.

For filmmakers with a lot of money to burn, working with computers has meant that audiences could see imagery that's simply impossible to create in real life, using the kinds of camera effects that Jean Cocteau relied on. James Cameron has talked about how his CGI-enabled camera in Avatar allowed him to literally fly alongside his characters as they zoom around on the backs of birds. And "bullet time," a technique popularized in Blade and the Matrix films is another great example of how computers allow us to see images completely impossible to film using conventional cameras.

Here's how that scene was mocked up by computers that knit together the views provided by cameras mounted 360 degrees around the action.

Like electronic music that provides us with delicious beats that no human-controlled instrument could create, CGI gives us what is essentially a non-human view of the world. We can see angles, images, and colors that our eyes and bodies could never capture - even with the aid of a conventional camera.

With the help of our computers, we see the world the way machines do. And we love it.

This week on io9, we celebrate the ways our computers are helping us reimagine the very act of seeing. They're changing the way tell stories, and transforming entertainment into something that cannot be created by humans alone. We'll bring you the very best CGI art, talk to concept designers who help build your favorite CGI creatures, explore the history of CGI and bring you deep inside the technology that enables it.

Top and bottom images via Rene Garcia.

Jang says that the movie is about his experience as a collector, feeling "endless desire." But we watch his tiny cyborg climb strange flowering plants, and following the impossible, gorgeous curves of a water pipe system, there is no feeling of urgency. Instead there is an almost meditative feeling as this lovely world unfolds. You're left with a quiet appreciation for all the hidden places where water droplets are to be found. And a desire to see more work from Jang.

via YouKu

It's pretty amazing to see all the work that went into crafting this insane rollicking adventure — from the guy wearing 3-D glasses to animate a scene, to the "camera" tracking as it goes down a staircase into the president's briefing room. Even more than all of the adulatory featurettes and cool soundbites, this look into all of the movie's insane prep work is making us excited for a crazy 3-D ride.

The still above is Simkin (the half mutated teddy bear character) who has been journaling all over the Chadam myspace about how everybody in Vulture City is scared out of their wits.

This second image is of the character Ripley. Chadam is created using the technology from Unreal Engine 3 that was also used in ground-breaking games Gears of War and BioShock.

Creator Alex Pardee Explains the creation Of Chadam:

Chadam Trailer:

[Alex Pardee]

Avery writes:

The videos I created, which eventually culminated into the music video for 'Drone' the musician are all inspired by the original photos. I myself am totally unsure as to the origin of the images beyond what I already known.. i.e. anonymous witnesses . . .

Since then, I have been accused of being the originator of the whole drone saga, and the photos were in fact just a viral campaign to promote the eventual video. This is definitely NOT the truth. In a way, I wish it had been, because that would make me some kind of viral genius, and I'd be in completely the wrong job lol.

I was involved in the discussions on OMF, Alien casebook, and other places for months, and the whole thing just reached a real frustrating deadlock between the believers and the non believers.. or real/hoax argument. I'd made my point until I was blue in the face, and was met by people telling me that the CG I had created was no where near as good as what was being shown in the photos. So I knuckled down and set out to create a video and images that would shut them up. So really, it is the very people who refused to believe CG was capable of creating the images that pushed me on . . .

It is bizarre really. I'm not sure what people think I am, but honestly, I am just a normal guy who does 3D graphics for a living. I pay my bills, have a girlfriend, a dog, and am currently looking at doing a bit of decorating around the house.

This leaves us with the still-burning question: Whose viral marketing campaign is this? And what are they trying to sell us?

[Zach Mandt's blog, thanks to cde]

Watching the trailer, you'd have no idea what to expect from the film. When you see a trailer for an American movie these days, you've seen the funniest lines, the biggest explosions, and you know all the beats in the story to look for. With this one, we went in knowing there's something about a toy and an alien, and a little kid who screams a lot... but only in the trailer.

While the movie is a "Stephen Chow Film" about CJ7, which turns out to be a weird sort of alien/toy hybrid, the real star of the film is Xu Jiao. She plays the part of Dicky Chow, a boy, who receives CJ7 as a piece of flotsam his dad picked up in the junkyard. She has more screen time than either Chow or the completely CGI-ized CJ7, and she's both charming and funny.

In fact, for the first time in one of Chow's films, children are the real stars of the movie, and he gets some stellar performances out of them. Check out the round-headed boy (who is also played by a girl) who wants to be an entrepreneur in the clip above. He ends up becoming Dicky's nemesis (more on that in the clip below), and later you realize you could watch an entire movie about the daily lives of these schoolkids.

Anyhow, the basic plot is that Dicky and his father are extremely poor, and Dicky's father works long hours in a construction job just to be able to send his son to an expensive private school. As a result, they live near squalor in a house that is falling apart, and he can't afford to buy Dicky any of the cool toys that the other kids have at school, like CJ1, a sort of Sony Aibo looking robodog. Dicky feels left out, and his dad goes searching through the junkyard to find a toy for Dicky.

That's where things go wonky. He finds a hunk of bright green phlegm-colored plastic that looks like either a strange basketball, or something that fell off a fisherman's boat. It's a poor toy compared to a robot, that's for sure. However, when Dicky's dad locks him in a closer for misbehaving (something Dicky does frequently), the ball comes to life and puts Dicky in some sort of a holographic projection that shows him a set of instructions in rebus-form. Later, the ball comes to life, and eventually becomes a little half fluffy / half plastic toy dog.

Dicky thinks the dog has magic powers and can help him handle the bullies at school. In fact, some of the best scenes in the movie are the fantasy sequences (like the scene below where CJ7 faces "the most violent dog in the world") that unfold in Dicky's mind. In reality, CJ7 is more like a little Pomeranian toy dog than a robotic alien savior, but he does come imbued with E.T.-esque healing powers that work on both people and machines.

Eventually Dicky has to learn to live without CJ7, although this is a movie aimed at kids and families, so don't expect it to end on a sad note. Much like Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle, this film is a bit like Looney Tunes on acid, with extreme over the top action sequences and CGI effects. The scenes with CJ7 and Dicky at school are the best in the film, and highlight how creative this Chow can be. At its worst moments, the movie drags a bit with Chow himself struggling at his job, or the heavy-handed father/son relationship which is tenuous at best.

CJ7 might look cutesy Hello Kitty-ish, but we totally want one on our shelves. The film opens this weekend, and is definitely worth checking out, especially if you like slapstick comedy and a little cuteness in your aliens.

That experimental laser that turns Bridges into a video game character actually zips an orange across space first, early in the movie. It's only later that a pissed-off Master Control Program does the same thing to Jeff's pesky ass. Of course, no one at the company seems to remember that they've invented teleportation either, at the end of the movie. Probably a more lucrative line of work to go into than gaming. Here are more secrets of Tron:

• Director Steve Lisberger saw video games in the late 1970s, and was fascinated with the world they existed in. However, he wanted to open that up to people in a non-cliqueish way, and he and his partner Donald Kushner set up an animation studio in 1977 to start developing the film.
• The film was supposed to be animated, with live-action bookends setting up the "human" side of the story. However, Lisberger met with Information International, Inc., who showed him footage of filming real actors in front of back-lit animation. They filmed test-footage of a frisbee champion hurling discs, and this convinced Disney to fund the film.
• Information International, Inc. had previously animated the android-vision in the movie Westworld, and they scanned and animated Peter Fonda's head for the sequel Futureworld, which was the first appearance of 3D computer graphics in a film. They also did animation tests for Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Star Wars, but they ultimately achieved the most success for creating a newspaper and technical document publishing system.
• Moebius, Syd Mead, and tech artist Peter Lloyd all contributed to the production design of the film, with each designing different elements: Moebius the set, Mead the vehicles, and Lloyd the environment. Mead also created the iconic Tron logo.
• Speaking of vehicles, when I was a kid those Recognizers scared the hell out of me. Yes, it's not really trivia related, but can you imagine one of these, on fire, and piloted by a Sleestak? Holy hell.
• Peter O'Toole was originally signed on to play Sark/Dillinger, but when he arrived on set and didn't see any of the physical sets or props, he balked.
• Apparently Jess Bridge's manhood created too much of a bulge in his "Clu" outfit, so he had to wear a dance belt to conceal it. The Big Lebowski, indeed.
• Debbie Harry screen-tested for the role of Yori. She probably told the producers to "Call Me," which they never did. Yes, that was a bad Blondie joke. Sorry.
• The scenes of the ENCOM labs with the laser teleportation array were shot at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Their own real laser is able to produce 28 trillion watts of power on target. The lab is now the home of the faster computer in the world, Blue Gene.
• The Tron videogame was a smash hit compared to the movie, which did moderately well. The game has far outgrossed the movie. In fact, it took several dozens of my quarters back in the 80s. It spawned a sequel called Discs of Tron, which is worth it just for the black light effect alone.
• A game sequel that ties into the movie, Tron 2.0, was released in 2003. It features Jet Bradley, the son of Alan Bradley (Tron) being zapped back into the computer world. It didn't do that well financially, but is worth picking up and playing. I still play the damn thing from time to time.
• Supertramp was supposed to provide two songs for the movie, but eventually those were provided by Journey. They are "Only Solutions" and "1990's Theme," and are pretty forgettable.
• Composer Wendy Carlos provided the rest of the soundtrack, doing most of the work on MOOG synthesizers. She had also provided the scores for The Shining and A Clockwork Orange.
• The Academy left Tron out of the voting for any visual effects awards, because they felt they'd cheated by using a computer. Oh Academy, always so forward-looking.
• A sequel for the film has been in the works since 1999, and last September Disney announced that the project continues to move forward based on a script by Eddie Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, who both write for Lost. Jeff Bridges has said he's excited about possibly reprising his role as Flynn.

• 

Here you can see people posing in front of the Nest last week. And here's a closeup of the crisscrossed steel girders that form the exoskeleton of the Nest. The Water Cube is actually made of high-tech materials that emulate bubbles to keep the heat inside the building.

Top image courtesy of AP; middle image by Feng Li/Getty; bottom image by Elizabeth Dalziel/AP.

When the pasty-faced Lance Guest finds out that his favorite game is based on reality, he's annoyed instead of thrilled. He keeps trying to ditch his awesome space-hero destiny right until the final reel. And the scene where he finds out about the horrible mass-murder of his fellow starfighters is played for laughs. Doom looks like a masterpiece in comparison to this video-game flick.