Graphics specialists are closing
in on one of their field’s longest-standing and most sought-after prizes: an
interactive and photo-realistically lifelike digital human. Such a digital
double will change the way we think about actors, acting, entertainment, and
computer games. In movies, digital doubles already replace human actors on
occasion, sometimes just for moments, sometimes for most of a feature film.
Within a decade or so, computer-game characters will be as indistinguishable
from filmed humans as their movie counterparts. And in time, this capability
will help bring movies and games together, and out of the union will come entirely
new forms of entertainment. This blurring of the real and the digital became
possible in movies recently when moviemakers reached a long-anticipated
milestone: They crossed the ‘uncanny valley’. The term has been used for years
to describe a problem faced by those using computer graphics to depict
realistic human characters. When these creations stopped looking cartoonish and
started approaching photo-realism, the characters somehow began to seem creepy
rather than endearing. Some people speculated that the problem could never be
solved; now it has proved to be just a matter of research and computing power.
Producing a fully realistic
digital double is still fantastically expensive and time-consuming. It’s
cheaper to hire even George Clooney than it is to use computers to generate his
state-of-the-art digital double. However, the expense of creating a digital
double is dependent on the costs of compute power and memory, and these costs
will inevitably fall. Then, digital entertainment will enter a period of fast
and turbulent change. An actor’s performance will be separable from his
appearance; that is, an actor will be able to play any character—short, tall,
old, or young. Some observers also foresee a new category of entertainment,
somewhere between movies and games, in which a work has many plotted story
lines and the viewer has some freedom to move around within the world of the
story. Creators of entertainment also dream that technology will someday make
itself invisible. Instead of painstakingly using cameras and computers to share
their visions, they hope to be able to directly share the rich worlds of their
imaginations using a form of electronic mind reading far more sophisticated
than the brain-scan technology of today. That magic means not only being able
to step inside a realistic virtual world without the cumbersome head-mounted
screens that create virtual experiences today.
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