I am guessing that a lot of you like me have toiled to secure tickets to this once in a lifetime show of computer animation prowess that dwarf's anything that we have ever seen before; or for that matter anything that we may see for some time now.
I like all of us were looking forward to this 3D extravaganza, and was looking to see how the creator has merged one world with another with such finesse that its hard to spot the seam in the stitching. But what i walked out with at the end of the film was not the general awe of seeing this visual spectacle but an IT vision of a utopian system rendered visually and presented to us as Pandora. Yeah yeah i know, you think that i have had too much to drink, but for the time being lets park the blame for this cross-correlation on the 3D glasses and dwell into what we saw--
//DISCLAIMER :: Some of what follows is hardcore IT stuff,
if (any of this is known to cause allergic reactions or induce motion sickness)
//i suggest you
break;
else //here is my take
1) The universal IO port -- The Na'vi and all living forms on Pandora can interface with each other using their pony tail (read IO port) that looks a lot like the RS232 port (i am not kidding, i am sure i saw 9 strands in the Navi's pony tail) that they used to interface with any element living or dead in the Pandora system.
2) Strong authentication -- The Na'vi could interface and create a bond with another creature in Pandora upon passing the strong p2p authentication post establishment of link. In case the authentication failed, the component that initiated the link is marked as malicious and could face deadly consequences from the other party including pre term garbage collection!
3) Shared communication protocol -- No matter what being you are on Pandora basically meaning what language you speak, you could transfer your thoughts over this universal link in a language that is common between all beings. Now stirring up my mind a bit more i vaguely remember that in ancient civilization like China and Japan, the people had pony tails. Maybe there was a pony-to-pony (p2p
) communication protocol in our history as well which may have been lost or compromised as the world took to hair cuts to supposedly look better
.
4) Serialization and persistence -- When the Na'vi died, the system did not lose the wealth of knowledge and experience that the being had accumulated. But the being's full state was serialized to the holy tree which i saw as the perfect RDBMS (SQL store) with infinite capacity to scale as it seems all Na'vi souls and their collective wealth of knowledge is captured in that single tree (I am sure after looking at this, Teradata and Oracle architects have a not so rosy yearly review in store for them this year).
5) There were other constructs like grid computing where all the Navi's connect with the tree and chant collectively to do some major transformations and Async calls where the tree responds to the Hero's prayers asynchronously by directing all animals to attack the humans just before the wait time out expired (or in this case the hero and heroine expired)
.
I am pretty sure, there were more such constructs which i may have missed which may require me to watch this movie a bit more closely the second time.
But this leaves open a few pertinent questions, if a non-tech person like the script writer can envision all these principles and show us what can be enabled with a few good design principles why is our world today diverging more and more from fundamental constructs and fuelling entropy!!