Re:How close are we to truly photorealistic, real-time games?
by InclinedPlane on Friday February 10, 2012 @05:14PM
(#3577712)
Pretty close actually. The easy part is the hardware and basic software. In 10 or 20 years a long list of technological innovations and cummulative advances will put more than enough processing power on people's desktops, bringing advanced rendering techniques like radiosity and ray tracing into the realm of real-time rendering with commodity resources.
But that's not that the hard, or interesting part. The hard parts will be making content and simulating physics convincingly. It is already hugely expensive to have artists painstakingly recreate textures and models for 3d environments, how much more difficult will it be to do so at higher levels of fidelity? Obviously we need some pretty significant tooling breakthroughs to make this problem even remotely tractable. The physics problem is even harder. It's a lot easier to fake it and just cram things into acepted game mechanics (invisible walls, imovable and indestructable objects, etc.) than to perform robust simulations. Physics may easily require more computing power than rendering.
But a simple immersive photo-realistic virtual 3d world is but a tiny corner of the implications of such technology. Think about augmented reality, for example, integrating smart phone functionality into the world around you convincingly using transparent displays. Or using VR goggles that reproduce images of the real world with overlayed data. Seemlessly integrating infrared or radar data, for example.
Imagine playing a game of cops and robbers except with enhancements that merge it with a video game. Or simply imagine the world being enhanced in a seamless and subtle way with computer data, like a hud but far more sophisticated. Imagine if every single person in the world was not a stranger to you, if you could instantly know their name, their job, their public history, etc. How does that impact society, friendships, business, government, war, etc. The implications are both broad and deep.
But that's not that the hard, or interesting part. The hard parts will be making content and simulating physics convincingly. It is already hugely expensive to have artists painstakingly recreate textures and models for 3d environments, how much more difficult will it be to do so at higher levels of fidelity? Obviously we need some pretty significant tooling breakthroughs to make this problem even remotely tractable. The physics problem is even harder. It's a lot easier to fake it and just cram things into acepted game mechanics (invisible walls, imovable and indestructable objects, etc.) than to perform robust simulations. Physics may easily require more computing power than rendering.
But a simple immersive photo-realistic virtual 3d world is but a tiny corner of the implications of such technology. Think about augmented reality, for example, integrating smart phone functionality into the world around you convincingly using transparent displays. Or using VR goggles that reproduce images of the real world with overlayed data. Seemlessly integrating infrared or radar data, for example.
Imagine playing a game of cops and robbers except with enhancements that merge it with a video game. Or simply imagine the world being enhanced in a seamless and subtle way with computer data, like a hud but far more sophisticated. Imagine if every single person in the world was not a stranger to you, if you could instantly know their name, their job, their public history, etc. How does that impact society, friendships, business, government, war, etc. The implications are both broad and deep.