Image source: Rockpapershotgun.com
Humans are by far one of the most common subjects of digital art. Thanks to the uncanny valley, people are more critical of artwork depicting humans than other kind of artwork. It’s ironic, isn’t it? Unfortunately, it’s just a crummy quirk of the human mind. It doesn’t matter how little an audience knows about artwork — everybody is an expert when it comes to recognizing human faces.
Luckily, the ongoing quest to create hyper-realistic human models in digital art has just gotten a little bit easier. A team of researchers led by Abhijeet Ghosh and Paul Debevec of the University of Southern California believe that they may have finally discovered the digital bridge that crosses the perilous uncanny valley.
Image source: Iryoku.com
The researchers believe that the answer lies in skin. I mean, look at Commander Shepherd from the Mass Effect series shown belwo. His face is pretty freakin’ realistic. The facial dimensions look accurate and his expression is believable. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the artists used a real person to model Shepherd’s facial dimensions. But would you ever mistake Shepherd’s face for a real person? No way. This piece of art, while rather impressive, is nowhere close to photorealism. Perhaps the researchers are on to something. If the dimensions are spot-on, then the only thing preventing the picture from looking realistic is coloring and lighting.
Image source: Geforce.co.uk
The researchers took high resolution pictures of volunteers’ skin. And when I mean high-resolution, I mean the type of high-resolution that you’d expect from NASA equipment. Each pixel in their absurdly high-res pictures occupied 10 micrometers, or about 0.00001 meters. That’s smaller than a human skin cell!
From there, the researchers used the pictures to create 3D models of faces. The resulting images are so incredibly lifelike that it’s honestly hard to tell which picture is the original and which picture is fake. Before clicking play on the video below, cover up the bottom one-third of the video player with your hand. Can you tell which is real and which is fake?
Obviously, this type of technology could revolutionize the video game industry. Activision and Nvidia have both expressed their interest in the research (meanwhile, Activision is making leaps on its own). I don’t blame them. The first video game to utilize this type of technology will blow the competition out of the water!
