Hi there! My name is Janko Roettgers, and this is Lowpass. This week, I interviewed James Cameron and Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth. Also: I talked to the CEO of Luma AI, and Snap is bringing WebXR to its Spectacles.

My interview with James Cameron and Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth

In December, Meta announced a multiyear partnership with James Cameron’s Lightstorm Vision to bring 3D entertainment to Meta’s Quest headsets. This week, Cameron joined Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth on stage during the company’s Meta Connect conference to share a first result of that partnership: Quest owners are able to watch an exclusive preview clip for Cameron’s upcoming Avatar 3 movie via the headset’s new Horizon TV app.

I had a chance to sit down with the duo ahead of their keynote appearance to talk about the potential that mixed reality headsets represent for 3D video, the complicated history of 3D TV, and Cameron’s attitude toward generative AI.

This interview has been edited for length and conciseness.

Why did you partner with Meta on 3D entertainment?

James Cameron: It just seems like a natural convergence. I had been proselytizing about stereoscopic media and entertainment for 25 years. It kind of went dormant for a while, because cinema was the only place to really see it. It had a brief life on flat panel TV, but the devices never really worked that well.

But in mixed reality headsets, you're innately a stereoscopic viewer. [When I saw] mixed reality headsets, it occurred to me: It's time to bring back the capability that I had spent 15, 16 years developing. So I stood up a new company, Lightstorm Vision, around stereoscopic production. At the same time, the Meta content team was looking for a partner in stereoscopic production [to] break into entertainment, meet the studios and filmmakers.

Andrew Bosworth: [We] were looking for each other without realizing it. We kind of pitched each other. It continues to be a tremendous partnership for us. [James isn’t just a great storyteller,] but also an innovator who can tell us: Here's the ways in which the thing that you're building is not meeting the needs of storytellers. To have somebody who is both an expert and a critic is an extremely high value for us.

A lot of VR storytelling has focused on putting viewers into the middle of the movie, making things more interactive. It seems like you're more about 3D stereoscopic, framed lean-back entertainment?

Cameron: You’re right. What I've spent a career doing is telling stories in a linear narrative format. Sometimes, those are documentary stories. Sometimes, those are completely fictional stories. But it's in a rectangle. 

Everybody was quick to discount the rectangle. But what that rectangle does is it directs the eye. Avatar movies are an example of what I like to do, which is give you a lot of things to enjoy within a frame. But the frame is the frame. The frame is telling the story.