Slashdot Mirror
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."
I had a couple of hundred television channels, and canceled my satellite service because there was never anything worth watching on.
Having a realistic world doesn't impress me. I'm holding off to see what they do with it before getting excited.
How can you gain new insights when you can't tell what is going to happen in the real world. You have to completely understand the model before simulating it.
I have a lot of karma to burn* so why the fuck not...
The poster sounds like a pup to use the phrase "Matrix-Like". Back when the Wachowski brothers were in high school, Gibson had already formulated the term "cyberspace" in Burning Chrome, which was a "Matrix-Like" VR before there was even a Matrix. Give credit where credit is due!
* I find people who post something along the lines of "I have a lot of karma to burn" before posting a rant end up getting modded plus points. Let's see what happens!
This is something that has always made me wonder. When computer graphics reach the point where you cannot readily tell if the image you are seeing is real or synthetic, how will this affect video game violence?
Can you imaging Grant Theft Auto X with full realistic imaging? How would that affect someone when they go beat a whore to death with a baseball bat and the mind cannot as easily dismiss the disturbing imagery as virtual.
about the matrix. I want to learn how to master kung-fu in a day, and fly a helicopter in a few seconds.
That's real power. Imagine if everybody could know every thing. that means everyone would push new boundaries and the wheel wouldn't ahve to keep getting invented.
The second kick ass thing was the ships.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I remember when I first heard of VR around 1989-90. I'm talking about the big headset with two screens one for each eye drawing a slightly different angle, with it also having head tracking and then draw the screens appropriately.
I thought, what an amazing idea! This seemed like the closest thing you could have to a holodeck (kind of like a holodeck in reverse). Anyway, some games came out in the arcades. One company in particular was virtuality. They had this game called Dactyl Nightmare that I tried a couple of times. It was like a fps where you and a friend were pitted in an arena against each other with a gun. There was also this pterodactyl flying around that would randomly try and grab one of you. Anyway, neat simple idea to showcase VR. Problem was, it was certainly not ready for prime time.
The screens were extremely low res. I mean it seemed lower than 320x240 per screen. But what really ruined the immersion factor was the frame rate. It felt like it was in the teens at best. Most of the time it felt like a slideshow.
Anyway, they had a couple other games at the time, and they were pretty much the same experience.
I still think it's a great idea, just way ahead of it's time. The problem was they were trying to do 3d (on two screens no less) in a 2d world. At that time, I think virtua racing/fighter just hit the scene. Almost all games were 2d still, and most certainly with the consoles/home computers.
I checked their wiki entry just now and there was a sequel to dactyl nightmare which came out about 3 years later that ran on a 486, so I could just imagine what the first ran on.
Anyway, the idea seemed to flop, but I always thought it was an idea ahead of it's time. Certainly we could do two screens at say 640 480 at 60 fps. It's been 16-17 years since I tried this and thought by now the idea would resurface.
Actually using human brains to do the processing would probably be a bigger feat than just fitting more gates on an IC.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
The joy of a virtual world is that it can take shortcuts, so it doesn't have to simulate every particle in the gaming world, it just has to create the results you see on your virtual computer screen.
But as for still frames and modelling, we're getting there:
Sexy Girl - http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=121&t=532817
Tattoo Guy - http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=121&t=550192
The Artist - http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=121&t=472843
As for realtime photorealistic animation though, we're a long, long way from there. Lighting is one hurdle, the bigger hurdle is content. Models, textures, rigs... forget rendering, all of this takes a lot of time to BUILD for a photoreal environment.
Its one thing to come up with a realistic model and scene for a photo-realistic still frame. Its another, to rig all of those models so that they can interact with each other in a pre-determined way. Its something altogether entirely different to do this in real time without predetermined paths and choreographed actions, and modelling all viewable elements based upon the degree of movement that a user has within the space.
This is very much highlighted in the differences between high-poly count models (for detailed stills) and low-poly models (used for 3D games). The "art" for immersive environments like simulated 3D gaming (fps, racing sims etc) is to come up with a convincing representation of a real world object with the lowest poly count possible.
Currently the difference between these polycounts is massive.