What James Cameron Thinks about Virtual Reality

After 13 years of waiting and repeated delay, Avartar 2 screening is around the corner in 3 days. As an evangelist of technological innovation in movie production, James Cameron also have his own view of virutal reality technology, which he think the public has a misconception or wrong definition to.

“Now what most people are calling VR right now isn’t VR. It’s really omnidirectional camera. And because you don’t really have any spatial control—any spatial movement is baked in—you [only] have the ability to look around in an environment, and that’s not true VR. [In] true VR, you can move around. And you have a lot of control over where you are spatially in the environment.”

Cameron is a very strict director in the term of visual quality & image clarity, for which he invested all the cutting-edge technology and resilient effort.

“But to do [real-time interactive VR] to a level of the kind of images we have in Avatar, I think that’s… several generations of technology away. It takes 100 hours of a massive render farm to do a single frame of an Avatar movie. So we’re decades away from being able to render at that level in real-time. Or maybe it’s a decade… whatever. But show me that and then I’ll say, let’s make movies in true VR.”

Being a creative director is to employ the most advanced frontier techniques to bring movie-goer new experience, Cameron is committed to create a real & interactive vitual reality environment which the player can have control on the virtual settings or things in the virtual world, not just for seeing them.

“Look I think… you know VR is kind of a yawn to me because I’ve been… our method of authoring the Avatar films… I work in a VR environment all day every day. When I finished with these interviews, I’m going to go work in VR for the rest of the day. Whether a new artform, a new form of cinema, that’s interactive can be created… I’m waiting for it to manifest.”

So let’s expect Cameron has more time to explore the REAL VR movie in his mind after the production of the Avatar sequel series, so we can marvel the movie or game with new VR technology again and again.