When it comes to presenting realistic-looking human beings in video games, the medium is still struggling with the uncanniness of virtual actors, but it’s improving as time ticks by, and sometime soon it will manage to convince all of us that what we’re seeing is human.One man who has been helping to keep it moving is David Cage, founder and CEO of the French game studio Quantic Dream. Six years ago, Quantic Dream released a video called The Casting, a real time rendered demo that eventually became the video game Heavy Rain for PS3. It was clear from Heavy Rain that these guys were at the frontier when it came to interactive storytelling and virtual acting.It’s been a couple of years since Heavy Rain wowed people, and now the studio has released KARA, their latest project. It’s another demo that, while not an actual game, exists to showcase the progress that virtual acting, and the new technologies the team has developed, have made over the years. Although it has just been released, the video was completed a year ago. It was created in real time using the studio’s new 3D game engine with full performance capture, no added effects or pre-rendering, and it looks incredible.As is a must with these things, the video is set in a future populated with robots, specifically fembots. These fembots are being churned out on a construction line when one of them begins to experience emotions which, at first, doesn’t go down too well.Check out Quantic Dream’s film The Casting below to see how much the technology has improved since this debuted in 2006.@stewart23rd
Advertisement