How much longer until you can not tell computer animation from real life?

[9nines]

Nvidia president said a few yaears ago, that it is not too far away.

What do you think?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLiX5d3rC6o

 

[natty1]

10 years

 

[Keysplayr]

They said that 10 years ago.

 

[alcoholbob]

Maybe if you SLI a million GTX280s together, assuming linear scaling...

Lack of polygons...when a living thing moves, blood vessels expand, muscles contract, surfaces in a million-billion places deform ever so slightly...all kinds of tiny things that you can't capture...

Even in a zoomed out scenario, like in a movie, all of these tiny things contribute to the movement of living being.

Well this is minor stuff considering collision detection is still in extreme infant stages. They are far from making realistic clothing, much less realistic people. There's a reason pixar only makes cartoons.

 

[Schadenfroh]

If ATI and nVidia continue to have the current level of competition, it will come a good bit sooner than otherwise.
Look at how the hardware 3D sound market stalemated after Aurea went under and Creative gained basically a monopoly in hardware accelerated 3d sound.

 

[nismotigerwvu]

Wow you're being kind. I'm pretty sure 3D sound has regressed since the A3D days.

 

[taltamir]

that depends, they are making good strides with brain to PC input devices... How long till you can jack into the matrix?

 

[solog]

47.2 years

 

[faxon]

probably a decade at least for pre rendered stuff like movies and what not, games longer still (as in we cant project that far realistically yet). didnt anand have an article on it a few months ago?

 

[QuixoticOne]

It may not be that long. Moore's law suggests rapid growth.
Beyond that there are entirely new technologies like quantum computing that could exponentially increase the capability of computing devices.

Already you can do non real time renders that are basically photo realistic with a decent render farm. So I'd say if the speed and capacity of computers increases about 1000x we'll commonly see such results in reasonably real time from individual PCs and totally perfect large scale models from small clusters. Thus... 18 months * 10 = 180 months, 15 years MAXIMUM.

 

[HannibalX]

They said we would have this when the GeForce 3 came out! John Carmack promised us! Waaa!

 

[wwswimming]

Maxim had a Maxim girl in 2004 who was 100% CGI. that would be
an interesting focus group. "how many readers realized Natasha (or
whatever her CGI name was) was not a real human being?" the few
images i saw @ CGSociety looked very real, at first glance.

plus there's one aspect of human anatomy - some real people look
cartoony. there was one woman in a swimming class i took about a
year ago that looked like the figure model Doonesbury used for some
of his characters.

put a high-res image of a cartoony-looking real person next to a
photo-real image created by someone gifted in CGI - that's a test
i'd like to see, as long as the real person is compensated for the
indignity of being called "cartoony" looking.

i would say the skill sets have been in existence for quite a while
now, among some CGI people, for still images. maybe 5 years.

for animation, e.g. a 3 minute short, if you took 10 of the top
1000 hands-on CG people, and found someone who was a dead
ringer for Bush's voice, you could do a "Bush press conference"
that would look completely real to a lot of the general public.

of course it gets harder if the output is 1080p or above.

if you look at some of the recent work of some of the more
skilled people at
http://www.cgsociety.org/

what i'm talking about might be more apparent.

there was one guy's private project, called "the normals",
about 3 middle-aged guys in a public restroom, not porn or
anything, just trying to make something photoreal. very
very impressive.

 

[taltamir]

moore's law should be called "moore's observation".
It just so happens that if you fudge it a bit, then PCs get about twice as fast every 18 months or so... (except, sometimes its 12 months, and sometimes it is 20 months.. and sometimes they don't get faster, just a lot cheaper and smaller, etc).
Basing future growth on moore's law is a bit naive.

The reason I said jack in... is because he said computer animation from REAL LIFE. not from a camera recording... I can tell it is on a computer because it is on a monitor, for it to be indistinguishable from real life it has to intercept my senses, and then modify them with fake data. like in the matrix.

One of the side effects of photorealistic animation... the end of the Hollywood type of celebrity, oh how I loathe them.