Just like recreating the Titanic disaster or forcing millions of people to watch tall blue aliens have sex with their hair, the idea of a glasses-free 3-D experience might be moving from James Cameron’s fantasies to reality. Inside The Magic reports Cameron’s company Lightstorm Entertainment has renewed a five-year agreement with Christie Digital to “create high-tech, immersive cinema.” So far, so boring press release. But the real news here is that part of the agreement includes Christie supplying one of their RGB projection systems to Cameron for the Avatar sequels. This provides massively bright and crisp images at a high frame rate—i.e. it pushes right up against the possibility of 3-D without those shitty plastic glasses.
This has been Cameron’s celluloid wet dream for a while now: He said last year that he wanted to develop the glasses-free 3-D experience for film, and this deal is the latest indication he’s very close to achieving it. Especially given the lead time here (Avatar 2 isn’t scheduled to come out until 2020), there’s plenty of time for situations in which his minions project a rudimentary 3-D on screen, only to have Cameron scream, “I want it bigger and better, you fools,” in the middle of discovering a new trench in the bottom of the ocean while wearing a cyborg submarine exoskeleton.