It was hard to tell the winners from the losers at the after-hours parties, which appeared to have lower budgets than previous years, but the same high spirits.

"The ability for an artist to direct the session, and make changes on the spot instead of hours or days later, will not only save time and money for the production pipeline, but also allow greater artistic freedom," noted Jonathan Rand, Organic Motion's president. "The ability to do on-location 'What if we did this?' explorations in realtime will enable the artist to come up with creative avenues that would not be possible when he or she is physically removed from the MoCap process."

Watching the 3D capture of a normal-looking person with this system, one can visualize a future application like that in Neal Stephenson's book Diamond Age, where a person is mocapped in real-life situations, and the mocap data is immediately transferred into a virtual world, allowing the person's avatar to interact in a very personal way with ongoing games or machinima-type movies. Organic Motion's system should be a real boon to entertainment and scientific MoCap applications. It will be available for around $80K in September. The present system MoCaps only one body; two or more body capability is planned for next year.

Major Trends in the Game Industry
Last year's article on the GDC quoted Mitchell Davis, ceo of in-game advertising company Massive, which was a pioneer in this rapidly growing field. Davis is now a happy camper -- his young 80-person company was bought by Microsoft for hundreds of millions, and you can now see his technology being applied throughout the Microsoft gaming universe. In-game advertising, which started with simple billboard ads in car driving games, is evolving into "fluid" or "seamless" mode, where advertising material can be applied to almost any surface in the game. For instance, a Coca-Cola ad buy could result in Coke ads in a game space on billboards, the fronts of vending machines, on T-shirts of characters and on cans of refreshment used in the game. Since such games are online, the ad-covered surfaces can be refreshed as needed, and even customized for certain types of players or their home locations.

The Wii found many fans at the GDC. Photo credit: Christopher Harz.

Resolution of game environments and characters keeps getting better, of course, and in some cases leads to unrealistic expectations, especially for facial features, which the human brain is hardwired to recognize in very fine detail. The term "Uncanny Valley," which has been applied to CGI movies and TV shows, is now being heard in gaming, as well. The term, introduced by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori, refers to the emotional response of humans to computer created characters such as robots or CG characters in movies. Humans tend to react favorably to somewhat realistic characters, with the subconscious understanding that these are, after all, artificial. When characters get "almost human," people become very critical, and instead of appreciating the features that have been skillfully created, tend to focus on anything that is still non-human. Remember films such as The Polar Express -- most reviews did not rave about the parts that were almost photorealistic, or how skillfully facial performance capture had been used, but focused on the "empty eyes" or "unrealistic smiles" of the characters. This area of repulsive response aroused by a CG character that lies between "barely human" and "almost human" is called the Uncanny Valley. This puts an extra strain on game producers, who have to either stay with fantasy-driven creatures such as monsters (for which people do not have such high expectations) or try to cross the chasm and produce very lifelike human characters.

One sign of how realistic games are becoming was a SRO lecture entitled, "The Imago Effect: The Psychology of Avatars."

Serious Games, games used for learning, continue to grow in importance. Once limited to low-cost productions generated by universities for a few hundred thousand dollars, some Serious Games now get serious budgets of $5-10 million. Two days at the GDC were dedicated to Serious Games -- this will be covered in a future article.

A continuing trend is that strategic partnerships are becoming more and more crucial to staying in touch with emerging game developer needs. Companies such as Intel and NVIDIA, which used to merely supply hardware for gamers, now have staffs that coordinate with major game producers as well as workstation manufacturers. Autodesk, in addition to partnering with hardware makers, has very active liaison teams with EA, THQ, Sony and other game producers.