I’ve been keeping an eye on a new video game that’s coming out soon called L.A. Noire. It’s a 1940s crime thriller being released by Rockstar Games, the same company that built its reputation around the Grand Theft Auto titles. But I’m not really here to discuss L.A. Noire’s content or the dark crime drama surrounding it. The big palooka that I want to point out today is the new technology that it uses—something called MotionScan.
You’ve probably seen the motion capture techniques that use suits with little white balls pasted all over them. These suits give computers the ability to track realistic human movements for special CGI film effects (think Lord of the Rings) or even video game realism. Those have been around for a while, but they’re only part of the equation here. MotionScan adds in precise video recordings of an actor’s expressions that are captured via 32 $6,000 HD cameras set up in a 360-degree arrangement around each actor as he or she performs their lines.
The result is an astonishing realism that’s never been incorporated in a video game before. And what it means in the L.A. Noire game is that you can see the lie run across a sultry femme fatale’s face as she gives her alibi, or quickly spot that lantern-chinned thug’s jaw-clenched determination to take a swing at you seconds before he does so. Each character mannerism, flinch and quirk is spelled out on the screen and, in turn, shapes the choices a gamer will make.
“This actually started as a capture for cutscenes,” said Oliver Bao, Head of R&D at Depth Analysis, the little Australian company that developed the MotionScan technology. “But we ended up using it for full game face. At the time, nobody thought this was actually possible, and nobody knew how to use it. So once it was working, people started thinking how they could actually make use of it and that became part of the core gameplay.”
This is pretty big. I can see this tech, quite literally, changing everything in the video gaming world—the virtual experience becoming all the more realistic and immersive. There’s no guarantees that will always be a good thing. Then again, what about movies? When games get this close to being interactive films, where does Hollywood go?
Recent Comments