With the phenomenal appeal of Avatar at the box office, JOHN HARRIS asks whether the film's popularity will provide a shot in the arm for virtual reality worlds like Second Life.

Irony of the week was that James Cameron’s Avatar played bridesmaid to his ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker at the Academy Awards.

The Hurt Locker picked up an Oscar six-pack – Best Film, Director, Screenplay, Sound Editing, Sound Mixing and Film Editing – while Avatar collected only three, for Art Direction; Cinematography and Visual Effects.

The Hurt Locker tells of the tour of duty by a US army bomb disposal squad in Iraq while Avatar is a 3D sci-fi flick about rapacious intergalactic corporate raiders attempting to evict a species of blue-skinned tree-huggers in order to mine a precious mineral with the unlikely name of unobtainium.

While Avatar played second fiddle to The Hurt Locker at Hollywood’s Kodak Theatre, it has conquered the war story at the box office.

The Hurt Locker has earned just over $20 million, a figure that equates to popcorn sales for Avatar, which cost more than $440 million to make and has earned more than $2.8 billion in ticket sales, making it the biggest blockbuster in box office history.

A serious chunk of Avatar’s production budget was consumed by the incredible expense of making a movie with an army of Big Bang Theory-type brains pushing the envelope of possibility with computer-generated imagery.

With Kiwi crowd Weta Digital taking the visual effects lead, Avatar boasts a swag of revolutionary visual effects, including photorealistic computer-generated characters, new motion-capture animation and improved facial expression tracking technology.

Capturing facial expressions required actors to wear individual skull caps with a tiny camera fitted in front of the actor's face to collect data on facial expressions and eye movement for transmission to computers.

The basic idea was to map 100 per cent of the actors' physical performances to their digital characters.

The “avatar” of the movie’s title describes a realistic-looking blue-skinned body that is “occupied” by a human controller to get up close and personal to the Omaticaya tribe that lives in a tree on top of a massive unobtainium deposit.

The word avatar is derived from the Sanskrit name for a god descended from heaven to earth.

The term was popularised in contemporary culture by Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash, which used it to describe a virtual-reality representation of a real person.

This was a mind-bending concept more than a decade before it was made a commodity by Second Life, an immersive virtual world at www.secondlife.com which lets you create an avatar that can drive, shop, fornicate, fly and even teleport if you want it to.

Although its active population is disputed, more than 18 million people have created user accounts to access Second Life since 2003.

With the phenomenal success of the Avatar film likely to provide a shot in the arm for avatar-creating environments like Second Life, it may be worth asking what we’re getting ourselves into.

The engaging nature of this virtual reality has led some users to report they became “Second Life addicts” whose obsessive role-playing ended up shutting out the “real” world from their lives.

If problems are piling up in the mailbox, there’s a lot of attraction to the idea of an alternative reality where your body looks hotter, your clothes always stylish and even unsafe sex is not life-threatening.

So while Avatar missed out on the top Oscar, it may revive Timothy Leary’s psychedelic slogan to “turn on, tune in, drop out”

John Harris is managing director of Impress Media Australia. Email jharris@impress.com.au.

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