LOS ANGELES—When Steven Lisberger made the original 1982 cult film TRON, he was ineligible for an Academy Award for visual effects, because he'd used computers—and believe it or not, that was considered a form of cheating at that time.

Fast forward 28 years to the sequel, TRON: Legacy, and not only have computers become a celebrated part of its filmmaking, but the movie's story and design address the significant advances made in the fields of quantum computing and artificial intelligence since then.

"We weren't interested in making a movie about technology—we'd talk about the technology through the relationships between characters," says director Joe Kosinski. "You won't hear about gigabytes and Twitter and Google, because any technical jargon would be dated five years from now. Once you got into the world of TRON, we thought of it more as a Western with another set of rules."

But those rules had to be plausible. Long before TRON: Legacy began filming, Kosinski and producer Sean Bailey spent hours picking the brains of physicists, neuroscientists and roboticists for ideas on how to ground high-concept plot points and scene design in actual scientific principles.

In fact, science and technology have been woven directly into the film's promotional campaign, with the latest event occurring Monday night when Kosinski and Bailey reconvened with two of the film's consulting scientists—California Institute of Technology physicist Sean Carroll and retired Jet Propulsion Laboratory physicist John Dick—on the stage of Disney's El Capitan Theater in Hollywood for a screening and panel discussion.

"We wanted a strong science foundation at key moments throughout the film, so we invited some of the smartest people we could find to provide answers we could incorporate,"  Kosinski said. "The discussion improved parts of the story and served as a springboard to better things in the movie."

TRON: Legacy, which picks up 20 years after TRON, chronicles a son's (Garrett Hedlund) search for his father (Jeff Bridges), who is trapped in a computer game that continues to evolve on its own. The panelists summarized some of the topics covered during their initial meetings: what artificial intelligence might look like in human form; how humans might fit into a computerized world; genetic algorithms (computations that improve on themselves based on past performance); and quantum teleportation (instantaneously moving objects over great distances by deconstructing and reconstructing them).

"What has changed in science since the first TRON came out is the creation of quantum computing and teleportation," Dick said. "We brought these ideas to the filmmakers. It is now conceivable that you could one day take a particle in the real world and teleport it into a quantum computer. The process for teleportation would likely involve sending the particle information into the computer, while the hydrogen and oxygen stays in the real world. The idea of emergence is also new. It says that in complex systems, or systems that behave in complex ways, behaviors emerge in ways you could not have predicted. An example of that in the film is the ISO characters [a race of self-created programs]."

That kind of input helped guide Kosinski's aesthetic in overt ways, such as manipulating the laws of physics (aka "heightened physics") to further distinguish the TRON world, as well as in unexplained design subtleties, like having canisters alongside the teleportation electronics—ostensibly to contain the chemicals and gases necessary for reintegrating digitized humans into the physical world.

" The input from the scientists helped tell a more consistent story," Carroll said. "We looked at what happens when computer programs become increasingly intelligent, and genetic algorithms become a big part of programs writing themselves, learning and changing, and going beyond what programmers initially wanted them to do. Would a computer program with a personality and aspirations have the same sense of consciousness as a person? Would you be the same person if you were uploaded into a computer?"

Meanwhile, Kosinski, who holds a degree in mechanical engineering from Stanford University, brought his own technical savvy to the table, explaining where he pushed the envelope in filmmaking. He employed the latest generation of the 3D fusion camera system developed by James Cameron that used adjoining digital cameras representing each eye, with lenses that drew in considerable light. The actors' costumes were specially designed illuminated flexible suits. And his rendering team advanced the backwards-aging process they developed for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button to depict Clu, a rogue computer program that looked like a younger Bridges. They used motion-capture sensors on Bridges' face to map a digital head, which was digitally composited on to a younger body double. "It's the first time an actor played against himself at a younger age," Kosinski notes.

Both the panel and meetings between scientists and TRON: Legacy creatives were organized by The National Academy of Sciences' Science and Entertainment Exchange, which pairs scientists and filmmakers for more accurate depictions of scientific principles in films and television. Since forming two years ago, the organization has picked up steam as both audiences and rising filmmakers, many of whom grew up in the digital age, have become more technologically sophisticated.

"Most Hollywood people don't ever talk to or think about scientists—there's a cultural barrier," Carroll said. "But science benefits when movies are more faithful to how scientists work, and movies benefit if they take science more seriously."

4 Comments

1. 1. nanogarden 08:54 PM 12/22/10

   The creative minds behind TRON: Legacy had the right idea by not 'Time casting' as opposed to 'type casting' the concepts of today's tech.
   
   People in the future from now [2010] would see the google and other references as we looked at defunct floppy disks and eye-burning monitors are to us now as opposed to '80s genre pc tech.
   
   Quantum Teleportation and Computing along with improved AI utilizing genetic algorithms and self improvement are going to become a mainstay of our infrastructure of tomorrow.
   
   The virtualised world of TRON helped make our tech what it is today, by giving everyone who watches it a commonality that crosses generations and cultures; past, present, and future.

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2. 2. gianlan 05:04 PM 12/24/10

   The repeated (twice), grating misspelling of, of all things, "principle", perhaps suggests that scientists and filmmakers ought to be joined by humanists, to oppose the sacrifice of aesthetics to utilitarianism of expression.

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3. 3. BobalongJim 06:08 AM 12/25/10

   It seems that the word 'teleportation' is being abused here. Am I teleporting a document if I scan it into my computer? Absurd.

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4. 4. marc_jellinek in reply to BobalongJim 02:12 PM 1/1/11

   Agreeing with BobalongJim and extending the argument: What is the "me" that would be "teleported into a computer"?
   
   This is the same problem I have with the "Singularity" set. Would a digital model of "me", implemented using some arbitrary technology, still be "me"?
   
   I hate to use SciFi examples, and especially ones associated with Arnold Schwarzenegger, but this core problem was nicely depicted in the movie "The 6th Day".
   
   The scene I refer to is when a dying (but not yet dead) clone is replaced by a newer iteration. When the newer iteration takes the older/dying iteration's eyeglasses, the older/dying iteration says "I'm not done with them".
   
   I think that this clearly states the problem: There is no transfer (a discrete state moved from site A to site B, which no longer exists within site A once transferred to site B). There is only a copy (a discrete state replicated into site B based on a template from site A).
   
   This is also brought to light by the fact that both characters played by Arnold Schwarzenegger believe themselves to be "original". After cloning, the clone was unaware they were a clone... and the original had no idea they were cloned. There was no "transfer" only a copy.
   
   Let's think about this a second: If I'm modelled in a computer (however you define "I"), there are going to be a lot of things that are simply no longer necessary.
   
   Does a computer model need to "eat", "excrete" or maintain a body terpurature? Since there is no digestive system, there is no need to eat or excrete. How about duplicate the process by which electrical signals are sent from one neuron to the next by the action of neurotransmitters?
   
   Since there are no neurons, there are no need for neurotransmitters. Since there are no neurotransmitters, there is no translation from their actions into perception or emotion (or the emergent phenomena that we experience as perception, emotion or self-awareness).
   
   I can't define what it is to be "me" or to be "human", but I believe the core of that eventual definition will involve perception, emotion and self-awareness. We can't define these things and we certainly can't model them.
   
   Even if we were successful at defining "us" and modeling "us", these definitions would be external and fundamentally different than the original templates (the "us").
   
   

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