Industrial Light & Magic: Games to Beat Uncanny Valley in 10 Years

Visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic expects game graphics to become "indistinguishable from reality" within 10 years.

In an interview with CVG, visual effects supervisor Kim Libreri shared his view that it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell the difference between live action and rendered footage.

The way its going, it's gonna be pretty hard to tell the difference between something that is interactive and rendered in real-time, and something that was done for an animated TV show, or even a live action thing.

"The way its going, it's gonna be pretty hard to tell the difference between something that is interactive and rendered in real-time, and something that was done for an animated TV show, or even a live action thing," he said.

"Ten years from now, I'm pretty sure, if you extrapolate where we've gone with the console generations and the changes in video and ATI hardware... We're getting to the point right now [with real-time rendered graphics] where we're matching the quality of an animated movie seven or eight years ago, and another ten years from now, it's just going to be indistinguishable from reality."

His comments come hot on the heels of similar ones from 2K Games' Christoph Hartmann, who said last week that game graphics needed to become photorealistic in order to communicate emotions. He claimed, "Until games are photorealistic, it'll be very hard to open up to new genres. We can really only focus on action and shooter titles; those are suitable for consoles now."

Industrial Light & Magic was originally set up by George Lucas in 1975 and has produced the visual effects for the Indiana Jones and Star Wars franchises, alongside many other well known films. The studio currently has 15 Best Visual Effects Academy Awards and is working with LucasArts on the upcoming Star Wars 1313 to try and create a high-level cinema aesthetic through vocal work and motion capture.

Source : feeds.ign.com