Matrix-Like VR Coming in the Near Future?

Anonymongoose writes "A researcher at Brookhaven National Lab reckons it could be just a few years before computers can pass through the uncanny valley. The article refers to this as a 'Graphics Turing Test': 'a computer can be considered intelligent if it can create an artificial world capable of fooling a person into believing it is the real thing.' Michael McGuigan has been performing some interesting experiments using Brookhaven's Blue Gene/L supercomputer and has shown that it can produce realistic lighting effects in real time. McGuigan's original research paper (pdf) is available online."

Comments

Re:This is assinine.

[j1m 5n0w]

Maybe they'll do a teapot next!!!

You obviously haven't visited the tachyon home page. (Tachyon was the renderer used.)

"Not there yet," When have I heard that before?

[objekt]

Oh yeah, it was back in the early 90s. Yup, way back then.

The really funny thing is...

[ignavus]

The really funny thing is watching all you people talk about this as if it is the future.

You have no way of knowing whether you are in a convincing artificial reality right now.

In fact, Hegel - back in the 1830s - already taught that all "reality" is virtual. It is *essentially* appearance. It is all a show, folks. It is meaningless to discuss "real reality versus artifical reality", because there is no absolute distinction between them. They are just "more real" and "less real" in relation to each other.

We philosophers knew all about the problems of virutal reality and knowledge of the world back in the 1600s and 1700s and 1800s - long before computers were invented.

Computers just help the people with no imagination to get the problem a few centuries late.

There. Was that trollish enough?

Um, raytracing isn't "photo realistic"...

[Joce640k]

Not even close.

It works for plasticky scenes with lots of mirrors and refractive glass balls but not much else.