Lifelike Animation Heralds New Era For Computer Games

[OmegaShadow]

http://technology.timesonline....web/article4557935.ece

Extraordinarily lifelike characters are to begin appearing in films and computer games thanks to a new type of animation technology.

Emily - the woman in the above animation - was produced using a new modelling technology that enables the most minute details of a facial expression to be captured and recreated.

She is considered to be one of the first animations to have overleapt a long-standing barrier known as 'uncanny valley' - which refers to the perception that animation looks less realistic as it approaches human likeness.

AMD last week released a new chip with a billion transistors that will be able to show off creations such as Emily by allowing a much greater number of computations per second. "If you're trying to process the graphics in a photo-realistic animation, in real-time, there's a lot of computation involved," said Mr Koduri.

 

[Zenoth]

Very impressive, looking at this I get about the same impression I've had when I first saw facial expressions and animations in Half-Life 2 back in 2004. The potential is certainly there, but the hardware has yet to come for it in gaming (and I mean as a standard, as in all and every single NPCs in a game having that kind of technology, not just one main character to show off the new tech as a demo labeled a game). Jusy try to imagine a game world filled with unique people like that, let's think an Elder Scrolls-like game, mind blowing. I'd say we need something like five years to see that happen in gaming.