You are not looking at a real human being. Hard as it is to believe, this video demo of a new 3D skin mapping technique is CGI being rendered in real-time.

Imagine playing Call of Duty or Skyrim or Arkham City with in-game characters that look every bit as 100% real as you and me, with living, breathing skin that’s both uniform and randomized to the perfect degree — perfect enough to fool the ultra-discerning human eye. Created by a pair of researchers named Jorge Jimenez and Diego Gutierrez, it’s called “Separable Subsurface Scattering” (SSS), it was made to be used by video game developers who need realistic human skin in modern video games.

The amazing thing to me is that the video and the technology behind it are not pre-rendered. It’s written in Direct X 10, and to prove it, Jimenez and Gutierrez have made their tech demo freely available to download. I know as I watch it that this character is a fabrication, but my mind refuses to accept that it’s not real, because it’s flawless.

Now I’m dying to see a character using SSS skin in motion. Let’s see the skin move, stretch, and contract. If it’s just as believable in how it moves, then future video game avatars are about to ascend to a whole new level of realism.

Everyone’s favorite Sith Lord (like you were going to vote for someone else?) is now available in cuddly, cute, Hello-Kitty fashion with these new skins by Infectious. Dubbed the “pink.invader,” this skin is available in several different sticky flavors, for your lappy, iPod, iPhone, BlackBerry, or Trapper-Keeper notebook. Alright, we made that last one up, but only because our Trapper Keeper had Optimus Prime on it, and it doesn’t get much more badass than that. Designer Michael Sison worked this bad boy up for Infectious, and he’s got another cool design too,  with retro Gameboy skins for the handhelds.

Now I get it; This particular skin may not be for everybody. That’s why you can check out the site and pick out anything else you’d rather have from their hundreds of designs, or create your own. There’s even some love for the Apple fanboys and girls out there, with special skins with the trademark glowing Apple logo cut out of the design. I’ve had dibs on this one for the past few months now, and someday I’m gonna get that thing. Alternatively, you can also just design your own, and have it look like whatever you want.

I can personally attest to the wear quality of these things, too. My wife picked up one over a year ago for her iPhone 3G, and it’s been holding strong ever since with no sign of wear and tear anywhere.

As you can check by browsing their website, there are a lot of skin categories so the options are endless. It can go from boring flowers to cool comics, from official NFL, NBA, NHL teams to flags of the world – you’ve got it all there for $15 each.

If you want something really unique, just create your own iPhone skin by uploading an image – priced at $20.