Giant Freakin Robot

One of the more memorable bits of futurism from Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report was the individualized advertising. As you made your way down the street, ads positioned on the surrounding walls would read your retinal pattern and shout product pitches at you by name. “Hi there, Frank McGilicutty, how about another trip to Maui this summer?” Or, “Say, Finwick Armbrooster, have you tried Valtrex?” It was a sharp satire of ad culture and an entirely too believable guess at what the future might hold. And now, the future is here…sort of. Jalopnik reports that GM has filed a patent for billboards that will offer up personalized advertising to drivers.

Thankfully, it’s not nearly as invasive or unsettling as Minority Report‘s tech. Instead GM will be using its OnStar navigation service to provide only the destination you’ve entered into the GPS to target specific ads at you via the billboards. So you might see an ad for businesses near your destination, or related to it in some way. No doubt anticipating the hue and cry over privacy concerns, GM also explains that the information will immediately be deleted from the server. It’ll still likely make those who like to stay off the grid nervous, but such is the price of living in our increasingly invasive culture.

So far Minority Report is racking up a pretty impressive batting average when it comes forecasting future technology. Aside from these billboards, the government is already working on pre-crime tech of a sort, and the motion-detecting computer interface is basically Kinect with a few more bells and whistles. Then again, it’s only appropriate that a movie about predicting the future would get a few things right…

The trials and tribulations behind the attempt to make a movie based on the Halo games are well documented. The fustercluck that the project became is all the more frustrating for fans because we’ve seen several amazing glimpses of what a live-action Halo movie could look like. There’s still no good news when it comes to Halo‘s cinematic future, but fans of Master Chief will have something else cool to look forward to this fall. Variety reports that Microsoft is working on Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn, a live-action web series set to premiere a few weeks before the release of the Halo 4 game on November 6th.

The series is designed both to appeal to die-hard Halo fans and to lure in newcomers to the franchise. Halo 4 is the beginning of a new chapter in the game’s mythology, so it’s theoretically a great place to jump into the series if you didn’t play the original games. Forward Unto Dawn will premiere on the Machinima website, as well as the Halo Waypoint online community. There is no concrete launch date as of yet.

CBS released a teaser version of Star Trek: The Next Generation on Blu-ray earlier this year, containing a handful of specially chosen episodes which showed off what the format could do for the classic sci-fi series. But now they’re getting down to the nitty gritty. On July 24th of this year they’ll begin releasing the entire show on Blu-ray with the debut of TNG’s entire first season on the high-definition format.

Here’s a look at the Next Generation season one box art…

The Avengers
In Theaters Friday

If you’d told me ten years ago that an Avengers movie would actually someday make it to theaters, I would have called you crazy. Much less a high-profile Avengers movie directed written and directed by the Buffy the Vampire Slayer guy. If you suggested that it would be one of the biggest movies of the summer of its release, I’d give you a sound thrashing for talking malarkey and send you on your way. Nevertheless, here we are in 2012, and all of those things are true. When Marvel announced their plan to link their upcoming super-hero movies, all leading up to the Avengers movie, not even the surprise success of Iron Man could quiet the naysayers. Against all odds, against the fundamental underlying rules of reality, we’re about to see the release of a star-studded Avengers movie, written by an honest-to-gosh geek who loves the source material. (And by most accounts, it’s really damn good.) I haven’t been this excited to see a geek fantasy fulfilled since somebody decided to cast Scarlett Johansson as a character that constantly wears a black catsuit. Between the already released and awesome Cabin in the Woods, and with both The Dark Knight Rises and Prometheus to follow this summer, it’s a damn good time to be a geek. And if you’re not a life-long Marvel fanboy, here’s a handy-dandy primer of things it would be helpful to know before diving into The Avengers.