Open Source Cinema

This will be a discussion of the future of movies. We will look first at the historical patterns and psychological underpinnings of innovations for human communication like decimals, literacy and the printing press, to help us speculate about how new virtual reality technologies might follow in remaking the production and consumption of cinema. The true promise may be more about an ease of creation, comparing and sharing of virtual scenes than the immersion of a head mounted display that has become emblematic of virtual reality. Technologies for generating and handling data will be as important as tools for realistic rendering. We will talk about how to get started with specific technologies like the kinect, three.js and mongoDB for democratizing cinema. Finally we will look at the power of movies to provide fake experience that changes minds, to create the fictions that hold our society together and how the application of that power might change in a more democratized future.