An 'arms race' in visual experience

• Filmmaker James Cameron sees thriving movie industry.

As USA TODAY celebrates it 30th anniversary, we interviewed some of the USA's greatest visionaries to talk about the world of tomorrow: How we'll live, learn and travel, what we'll do and who we'll be.

SANTA MONICA, Calif. -- Long live the movie theater.

Filmmaker James Cameron believes the cinema experience will not only survive but thrive for the next 30 years and beyond -- despite worries about the movie industry's health.

"There will always be a need to gather in a dark room as a group for these social experiences -- checking your emotional dipstick to make sure your oil levels are OK," says Cameron, 58. "If you laugh when everyone else laughs, or if you cry when everyone else cries, then you're OK."

But he believes the struggle to keep the movie theater alive is very real.

"There's an arms race between seeing movies on the big screen vs. the accessibility and immediacy of (home and) mobile platforms," Cameron says. "It's incumbent on us to keep the cinemas as vibrant as possible."

Cameron has proven his theater pulling power with the two box-office champs of all time, 2009's Avatar and 1997's Titanic. He foresees enhancements that could include wider screens to intensify the experience.

"It could wrap around and fill your view. Right now, we're asked to look through a rectangle and imagine a world. I think we'll lose that rectangle."

The step beyond that could be eyeglasses that beam lasers directly into the viewers' retinas to make moviegoers feel as though they are part of the dramatic environment.

"There might be a certain amount of interactivity, so when you look around, it creates that image wherever you look," Cameron says. He concedes it is far off: "You're talking Jetsons here."

Cameron, whose use of 3-D in Avatar changed the course of filmmaking, believes that the added dimension will become dominant and that 2-D movies will become a rarity.

"The 2-D movie is going to be like the black-and-white TV show," he says. "You don't see much of that these days. You may see (2-D) in cinemas as a nostalgic art form."

The added dimension also will rule over home television ("it will revolutionize broadcasting") and mobile devices. "It's going to be about getting (the mobile-device 3-D) up to the level of the movie theater, which it will."

Cameron also expects further implementation of performance-capture used for the Na'vi people in Avatar.

"As the cost of generating (a computer graphic) world at photo-realistic levels of detail comes down, which it will eventually, then you are certainly going to see more of that."

The director, the subject of a 2009 biography, The Futurist, does not foresee other revolutionary technology that will change movie-watching.

"If I can imagine it, I'm building it," he vows. "Dude, what do you think I've been doing for the last 25 years?"

His bullishness about cinema's future is tempered only by his concern for the world's future: "We need to get our game face on when it comes to dealing with the myriad global problems coming toward us, or the future might be a hand-cranked 16mm projector on a sheet in the desert."