Avatar dates back to 1977, when Cameron was just a truck driver determined to "out-Lucas George Lucas" in the outer space epic genre, but it took decades to get the clout to make as outrageous a project as Avatar. When he first sat down to plan the movie, his tech people told him his vision simply was not possible—"'If we make this, we're doomed,' one of the artists told him. 'It can't be done. The technology doesn't exist.'" He had to wait until after Titanic before he could tackle the project again.

This time, he got more invested in the tech side of it. The problem: He needed an incredibly high-definition camera that could deliver both 2D and 3D, without the headaches that sometimes accompanied two hours of 3D watching. There was a camera that could handle it, made by Sony, but the giant 450-pound unit wasn't feasible for Cameron's style of directing—so in 2000, he went out to Japan and persuaded Sony to re-engineer the camera to his liking. They ended up separating the camera's huge CPU unit from its lens, connected by a cable, thus bringing the handheld weight down to only 50 pounds.

Cameron lent the camera to filmmaker buddies to spread the gospel of 3D so his eventual release of Avatar would have the distribution it needed. Spy Kids 3-D and the Lord of the Rings trilogy opened the doors for technologically astounding epic films, just what Cameron orchestrated. His camera and belief in 3D is setting the stage for the current era of blockbusters—not necessarily something you'd expect from a guy who releases a movie about once every 15 years. [Wired]

The Nikon Festival has the theme "A Day Through Your Lens," and asks budding filmmakers to upload digital films with that theme, of length less than 140 seconds, to their website. The contest is six weeks long, starting right now. Festival judges include Rainn Wilson (Dwight Schrute of The Office fame), photographer Chase Jarvis, and some girl unfortunately described as an "Internet Personality" with the even more unfortunate name of iJustine. But guys, Rainn Wilson!

Oh yeah, and Ashton Kutcher will be sharing his own entry, partly because he has an advertising deal with Nikon and partly because this contest is tangentially related to Twitter. That '70s Show was a long time ago, you know, and now Twitter is his job—and Ashton Kutcher is nothing if not dedicated to his job.

The winning filmmaker will get $100,000 and some sweet Nikon gear, and there'll also be an audience favorite award worth $25,000, in case iJustine is out of touch with modern independent filmmaking. [Nikon Festival]

For the most part, do you consider these digital upgrades as good or bad ideas?

The important part of Gawker's memo is here:

In the coming weeks, we hope to announce initiatives to develop digital versions of our brands that will make use of new devices and distribution channels.

New devices makes it seem like it's not just moving those four publications online—a move that would have succeeded already if just going online would save magazines. It's that new devices bit that's intriguing. [Gawker]

Outside it looks like a normal peephole. Inside, the $160 device gives you two kinds of view: Regular and zoomed, which can be switched with a single front button. According to the manufacturer, it runs on two batteries for up to 1700 peeps. [Bold Technology via Red Ferret via Unplggd]

There isn't a whole lot to explain, other than the fact that the adapter is now basically set to deliver full audio quality to the video content played back on your Mac, and all through one HDMI cable. The previous version was held up because of manufacturing issues, so we'll have to see if this version suffers from the same difficulties. [Kanex]

A Powershot dressed up in an ELPH suit, Canon is aiming the point-and-shoot at the "advanced amateur."

The 10-megapixel cam has a High Sensitivity System sensor in addition to a super 28mm wide-angle f/2.0 lens. According to the release its also got a customizable control ring for accessing shot settings and a range of shooting and recording modes, including RAW and JPEG.

The S90 will be available in October for $430. [Canon]

The Avatar Digital Binocular Sports and Spy Camera has a 2.5 LCD screen, USB connectivity, video out, and up to 3GB of memory using a 2GB memory card. It suppors the usual video and audio playing formats, recording at 25fps in 640 x 480 mode. [Chinavision via Red Ferret]

Slate's Farhad Manjoo points out more reasons (bothered from Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain) why we should be absolutely terrified of "tethered" devices like the Kindle, especially if we're headed toward a truly paperless and discless future, where books, movies and music are all downloaded. Imagine if there were no paper copies of 1984, and Amazon—or whatever company wins the ereader war—deleted it. Or any other book or film that's been banned at one point. It's much easier, after all, to delete them off of a million devices than to actually pull one thousand paper copies out of people's houses. A possibility that's more, uh, possible with breakthroughs like self-destructing data. (One more reason we'll always need something like BitTorent, more than ever in the future, not less.)

If hypotheticals aren't your thing, take the 2004 TiVo vs. Echostar patent infringement case. When TiVo won, the judge ruled that Dish didn't just have to stop selling infringing DVR boxes, they had to actually remotely kill the boxes they'd already sold. Boxes they had installed in people's houses.

Granted, Jonathan Zittrain is the same crazy guy who says that the iPhone is killing the internet, but you know, this time he actually seems kinda right! I hope he's still just crazy though. [Slate]

[noquedanblogs via notcot]

According to Panasonic, iPod merge is not just a connector for the iPod, but gives you full access to your iPod multimedia content—including music and images—using a dedicated user interface integrated in their inflight entertainment system:

Panasonic's technology roadmap calls for introduction of iPod merge, which goes a step further then basic iPod connectivity by allowing content metadata to be integrated or "consumed" into the graphical user interface (GUI) and displayed to the passenger via the IFE screen.

As you can see in the image, it also connects to digital cameras via USB, allowing you to extend your vacation a little more by seeing your fresh pictures on your way back home, and providing the rest of the passengers with hours of laughter and entertainment. [Runway Girl]

Fremer, if you have yet to decipher this, is an audiophile of the highest calibre. Literally millions of dollars of premium audio equipment have passed through his listening room under review for Stereophile magazine, and he's been obsessing about vinyl since he was four years old, memorizing the labels of his parents' 78s. A man who, when digital recording and reproduction methods began to surface culminating in the compact disc's takeover as the predominant music format, became a figurehead for the vinyl superiority movement, staunchly advocating its greater tonal resolution over a CD's 44.1 kHz max. (See this MTV clip for Fremer in action, circa 1993.)

In short, a species of human I had never known prior to hanging out with him in his New Jersey basement listening room last week, and a species, frankly, I was skeptical of in just about every possible way.

Upon getting picked up by Fremer at the train station near his home, my fears immediately began to feel all too real. It was but a minute or two into our car ride from the station that a rant on Walt Mossberg's inferior review of the Airport Express, Apple's music-streaming mini-router that Fremer and I both enjoy in our home systems, begins in earnest:

"If he's not going to tell people how it sounds, then what's the fucking point? Don't step into my world, Walt!" Multiple emails of complaint to poor Walt are cited. I am definitely thinking "uh oh" at this point.

But then, settled into the lone leather chaise in Fremer's basement audio temple, nestled right in the sweetspot of his $65,000 Wilson MAXX3 speakers, I hear the needle drop on Air's "Run" from Talkie Walkie. It's a song I've never heard (kind of fell off Air after overusing Moon Safari considerably), but one that I'm now listening to all the time. Because, with all honesty, I have never heard anything like that song played on that stereo system at that moment. Ever.

The song ends, and after emerging from an opiate-like haze, I hear a hiss. And yes, while the record was playing, I heard a pop, a crackle or two. Isn't this as high-end an audiophile system as they come? Shouldn't the sound be of such purity so as to sustain life in lieu of water for days on end?

I mention this slightvery slight, but noticeablehiss to Fremer, and it's probably a frequency that 50 plus years of rocking have eliminated from his spectrum. He doesn't even care. This is when I start to understand.

After hearing I'm a Bowie fan, Fremer drops into his near limitless stacks and spins a pressing of "Heroes" with part of the title track's chorus in German. I'm giggling with pleasure at the frankly obscene level of detail I hear (Ich! Ich werde König!), but of course, I'm hearing the pops and crackles that a 30+ year-old record is likely to have. Shouldn't a $350,000 stereo system be completely free of such impurities?

"It's like when you go to the symphony, and the old men are coughingsame thing," Fremer says. Necessary impurities. Reminders of being in the real world.

We play my solid 256kbps VBR MP3 of "Heroes" off my iPod; it sounds like shit. Free of pops and crackles, yes, but completely lifeless, flat in every way. This is the detail that matters: Audiophiles are basically synesthesiacs. They "see" music in three-dimensional visual space. You close your eyes in Fremer's chair, and you can perceive a detailed 3D matrix of sound, with each element occupying its own special space in the air. It's crazy and I've never experienced anything like it.

It is within this 3D space where the audiophile lives and operates, and spends all his money. Fremer himself is the first to admit that it would only take $3,000 to $5,000 to build a system that will be deeply satisfying to most music fans. On a scale of 1 to 100 completely of my own devising, let's put this system at around 85. Now, imagine that you've tasted 85, and you want to go higher; you want Bowie's cries of kissing by the wall to inhabit the most perfect point in your system's matrix, and Bryan Ferry's back-up fly girls on "Avalon" to flank him just beautifully. That, friends, is where you might end up paying hundreds of thousands.

Our little scale, unfortunately, is logarithmic, in that going from zero to 85 doesn't take a lot of effort or money, but going from 98.6 to 99.1 by swapping out a $2,600 AC power cable for a $4,000 one becomes a justifiable end. We did exactly that, and I strained to hear any difference at all (more impressions of our test will follow later in the week), but to Fremer, the difference was abundantly clearnot necessarily better with the more expensive cable, but different, a warmer, fuller sound, as Fremer described it. Here's the breakdown of his current listening-room hardware:

The point is, people like Fremer can not only hear the difference, they crave it. I walked into his listening room expecting to discern absolutely zero difference in the comparison tests we had planned, swapping out speaker cables that cost as much as a meal at the best restaurant in New York for another set that cost as much as a year of undergrad at Harvard. I actually did hear a tiny difference. But to people like Fremer, that tiny difference becomes a mind-boggling disparity, and it's worth paying for if it means a few decimal points closer to perfection. Unfortunately, the logarithmic curve is asymptotic: There is no ceiling. Fremer will be the first to admit that this type of dragon chasing is not and should not be for everyone.

This obsession with tiny differences explains Fremer's fevered defense of analog music sources over digital. Two anecdotes from the past are particularly illuminative:

The first is his memories of rushing to the record store in 1979 to pick up Ry Cooder's Bop ‘Til You Drop, the first mainstream rock release to be recorded using an all-digital process, which at the time was being lauded as the next big thing. But upon getting it home and dropping it into his high-end system, the results were not good:

"It made me feel horrible!" he remembers. Even though it was played on vinyl, Fremer could already detect some missing elements in the 3D audiophile space that just weren't there. "And it's not like I was a digiphobe at this pointI had no reason to be. I was as excited as anyone to hear this."

The second was the first public playing of a compact disc, to a room full of expectant audiophiles a few years later. While they breathlessly applauded the first track played from the then refrigerator-sized device, Fremer was horrified. He heard the same flatness and lack of detail in the 3D audio world he loved to inhabit. "I felt…weird. My hands were shaking. All I could think, then, was WE'RE FUCKED!" A few days later, a new, custom-printed bumper sticker was slapped on Fremer's car: "COMPACT DISCS SUCK."

And thus began a long battle, and thankfully, it seems to have ended happily. Both with the advent of SACDswhich Fremer is a great fan of, proving that he's not hung up on nostalgiaand the greater acceptance and continued life of vinyl, Fremer is a happy man these days. "I'm on top of the world right now. I set out to save vinyl, and we did it."

Because the thing is, Fremer loves music first and foremost. The audiophile I had feared was one who cares far more about the overpriced gadgetry than the actual music. This is not who I ended up meeting. This man listens to music and makes sure it was recorded with the best fidelity, that the intents of the artist have been preserved. And thank God he does, because we certainly don't.

I listen to most of my music on downloaded, compressed, lossy MP3s, and so do you. But even if you can't hear the sound quality, we need someone like Fremer up on that wall, a preservationist of archival recordings and an ombudsman for new recording techniques, because one day you'll want to hear it, and it'll be there because of audiophiles.

These guardians in and outside of the recording industry ensure that, whether it's in a movie theater tomorrow or in your own home listening room on some far off future date, you'll be able always get back to a recording that expresses every frequency, every ounce of warmth and life, of the original performance. Because if you can hear, it, if you ever get to live in that 3D space, you'll be glad Fremer helped defend it.

For more audio goodness, hit up Fremer's own site at musicangle.com

Listening Test: It's music tech week at Gizmodo.

By Singapore-based Design Act, "My Dream, Our Vision" is constructed from 3866 cubes of varying opacity, and serves as a physical manifestation of the intangible: digital information floating above the green landscape. Embodying "xin" (or "new"), visitors are beckoned inside by music to post their dreams of tomorrow, to incite innovation.

And it just looks really, really cool.

[Design Act and World Expo 2010 via Inhabitat]

Many manufactures stopped making the devices in January, expecting the demand to peak around the original Feb. 17th shutoff date. Therefore, the extension kind of leaves them with their pants downso to speak.

The trade association estimates U.S. retailers have 3 million to 6 million boxes at hand.

"The worst case is that there are only 3 million boxes," Petricone said. "Retailers would then run out of inventory by the end of February."

Throw that on top of a huge waiting list of 3.7 million rebate coupons, and you have yourself a powder keg of problems. The stimulus package that is currently in the works could help diffuse the situation to a degree, but the bottom line is that this is never going to go down without people being left out in the lurch. They should have just pulled the trigger on it this month and got it over with. [Physorg and Getty Images Photo]

Low-power stations are not required by the FCC to make the switch to digital on Feb. 17th, so viewers who want to continue watching all of their programing need a converter that can handle both digital and analog signals. Based on cost factors and confusion, in the end most viewers will probably end up buying a standard digital converter box with their government coupons and saying goodbye to their favorite analog channelswhich puts the future of those stations in jeopardy. [Dallas News and Getty Images Photo]