Video Game Graphics Are Gettin' Really Good

[Seil]

It's a little well-designed and edited little video from the makers of Heavy Rain.

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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- The future of performance-capture technology is right around the corner, and its name just might be "Kara."

David Cage of video game developer Quantic Dream unveiled a new way to simultaneously capture and digitize an actor's performance -- including voice, face and body -- during a presentation Wednesday at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. The innovation came in the form of a 7-minute non-interactive demonstration titled "Kara."

In the footage, which Cage said could be entirely run on a PlayStation 3, actress Valorie Curry portrays an android named Kara who gains self-awareness as she's being assembled by a squad of robotic arms.

The virtual Kara emotively speaks in English, French and German, as well as sings in Japanese, as she converses with an operator who is heard but never seen.

"I think the most interesting future feature in the next-gen platforms should be meaningful content," said Cage.

"Yes, technology is great and is going to be better and better, and we'll have more power until you won't be able to tell the difference between reality and virtual, but what are you going to use this technology for and what do you have to say?"

Cage, who wrote and directed the 2010 thriller game "Heavy Rain," noted that "Kara" is a demo, not Quantic Dream's next project.

He said the new technology from the French studio could be used for full performance capture, a technique where all aspects of a portrayal are recorded at once, rather than the common practice of separately capturing them.

Unlike the methods used to capture actors' performances in "Avatar," Cage said the performance capture technology developed by Quantic Dream used about 90 sensors placed on an actor's face instead of a small camera mounted in front of the actor's noggin. It's also faster, less expensive and requires quiet because the audio and movement are captured together.

Now, I know that there are a few art buffs hanging around - heck, Fifth did a thing for his CGI class not too long ago. I'm just wondering the mechanics of this as an art thing and as a video game thing.

(Also, does anyone else think that this concept could have a really cool Blade Runner-esque game?)

[Regulus Tera]

That's what I've been hearing since 1998.#DiminishingReturns

[Kim]

This video bugs the shit out of me on a few levels and I can really only approve of a few of the ways in which it does.

[Aldurin]

That is a really good demonstration of the creative potential of the PS3, and probably slightly offputting people that are too used to nothing but seas of Final Fantasy versions of Justin Beiber.

I approve.

[Bells]

I'll be honest... i'm skeptical at best. They said the same about L.A. Noire and it was far from it. Graphics nowadays are good, and in fact, we are at a good moment at gaming where a good game doesn't need amazing graphics and you don't have to buy a new pc each year...

But we are all quite awre that there is a huge difference between Gameplay Graphics and CG Movie Graphics...

Hell, just go back to Final Fantasy 8, see what the CG's show and what the game show for graphics... hell of a difference.

Now, if this was an interactive demo, THEN i would be majorly impressed.

[Amake]

The most amazing thing is, they've developed this cutting edge technology and spent who knows how many man-hours and how much computing power to make something that probably would have taken like five people a whole week to create in 1992, except that would have looked just a tiny bit less fake.

Performance capture has questionable utility as a whole to me, but isn't it sort of completely wasted when you just use it to recreate that same actor doing the same performance?

[Ecks]

I don't know, I think it has some potential applications where the actor's performance is important as a whole to the project (i.e. games like Devil May Cry where essentially the VA is also the one doing the mocap for it). It cuts down on time and allows an actor to fully get in character, possibly improving the quality of the performance.