The Video Game Character of the Future

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.