After reminiscing about the past, Entis gave a few predictions about the next 30 years. Having been massively influenced by Ray Kurzweil's book The Singularity is Near, Entis anticipated huge changes in everyone's daily life. Processing speed, memory, display quality and communication bandwidth will explode. Buzzwords will be portability, interactivity, artificial intelligence and costs. Speaking of his future, Entis also gave a glimpse of his future plans: His original idea is to take two years off before deciding anything; two years of reading, doing his own writing, photography, going to conferences like fmx, putting his antenna at full extension and sensitivity, talking to people, thinking about things, writing about things... but life never works that way. "I am going to be a general partner in a new venture capital fund that is starting up in Vancouver, that will have at least [allow me] to focus on digital media and games. It is way too early to announce details of that. But that will also leave me time to do some other things. I am going to be the new chairman for a local chapter at SIGGRAPH in Vancouver, of which I am very excited about. My first SIGGRAPH was in 1979, but I have never had any kind of officer role in anything SIGGRAPH-related. I love the fact that it is my local chapter, because I love Vancouver and I love the computer graphics community there. It gives me a chance to actually be a very active part of that community, to help it grow and bring in some interesting input..."

Already some of those big changes in computer graphics Entis spoke of were present at fmx/08:

Patrick Davenport from Image Metrics presented the company's revolutionary performance driven facial animation software, which was used on Devil May Cry 4. Courtesy of Capcom.

For instance, Patrick Davenport from Image Metrics presented its revolutionary performance-driven facial animation software. This software arguably marks a turning point in capturing the very essence of a performance of an actor very accurately and very, very fast. Many visual effects houses have already implemented this amazing tool in the production pipelines and rumors have it that there will be some fantastic output in the next months. It was also utilized on the blockbuster Grand Theft Auto IV videogame. As Davenport stated: "What we have, is a very unique way of capturing an actor's performance, his facial performance. We don't use any markers. We don't use special lighting, special cameras or even make-up. We can take any 2D image, whether it was shot on film or video. What we deliver to the clients, unlike motion capture, where the data is supplied and is baked in, we actually supply the studio with animation files. Whether it is in Maya, 3ds Max, LightWave, even Houdini now. What we give to the animators is the facial performance and it can be 100% of the final facial animation in the scene, but it actually might just be 80%, but it gets them to where they need to be much faster and much more accurately. And then the animators can integrate that into the scene and they can actually keyframe on top of it."

That opens up a wide array of new possibilities. Anything acted out in history and accessible in film can be analyzed by Image Metrics software and converted into animation files. "Typically, if you can see a person's facial performance in the film or video then we are ready to analyze that. This is usually the rule of thumb: if you can see it with your own eyes, we will be able to analyze that using the software. So, we could go back and take a performance of somebody that was filmed in the 1940s and apply that performance to a photorealistic full color CG-model nowadays And so you can bring back this performance in glorious Technicolor." But there are more things you can do with Image Metrics. Because of the extraordinary ability to analyze the most subtle things in the facial performance, you can play heavily with different mentalities. If a film is dubbed for a certain country, you could use the facial performance of the actors, who are doing the dubbing, to create mentally correct performances for this particular country. And there is another interesting point for human actors: "When you are a 28-year old actor, you can get yourself scanned now and you would be able to take that scan in 15 years time, using all the current technologies, you then can do a performance as when they are aged 35 but they apply that to a 20- year old model of themselves. So you are extending the longevity of an actor's career. You know, which is one thing. And, as an insurance policy for some of the actors, which are perhaps a little older now. And like many of the British actors that have enjoyed the beverage in their lives. And there might be some that will not make it through the whole movie. You know now, you can scan that actor and have them do their read through, their performance of their part just before they start shooting. And that's your insurance policy. Because than you can recreate them digitally if something is happening to them!"

Torsten Reil of NaturalMotion did an impressive presentation about euphoria, a new software also heavily used in Grand Theft Auto IV. As Reil stated, the fundamental new idea behind euphoria is that it runs parallel to the game's animation engine and is called by the game's AI whenever synthesized motion is required instead of canned animation. "With euphoria, animations are not canned but are generated on-the-fly by the CPU as the game is played." That means in terms of Grand Theft Auto IV, instead of dumb innocent bystanders behaving like mere rag dolls, you get characters behaving on their artificial intelligence behavior modules, who are acting autonomously on their own and always in different ways, never repeating themselves. This brings on remarkable effects. Those new artificial intelligence modules create interactive animation in realtime and will bring also a new career opportunity to the field of videogames: next to animators so-called behavior engineers will be needed very much in the future. "They have to be good at mathematics, must have a 'good eye' and be experts in C++."