Epic Games believes the next-gen hardware will be capable of crossing that so-called uncanny valley.

First, we need to describe what uncanny valley means: it’s a concept where humanoid characters almost look real, but they still end up causing repulsion in the viewers/players. This thought originated from Masahiro Mori, a Japanese roboticist, and it has been applied in real-time, three-dimensional computer graphics as well. This valley, according to Kim Libreri, Epic Games‘ Chief Technical Officer, will be crossed, going by the interview with VentureBeat:

„Right now, when we do the demos, to get them to run at 60 frames per second or VR frame rates, we end up needing a pretty beefy graphics card to render all the hair. But if you have a character that doesn’t need actual individual splines of hair, you can run that on a modern PlayStation or Xbox. When we start to see a next generation or whatever that is, the uncanny valley is going to be crossed in video games. It’s going to end up being not about your technical expertise to make these things. That technique will become ubiquitous over time. It’s got to be about telling an awesome story where people will want to watch that face get involved and do interesting things.”

The Siren demo technology, revealed by Epic at this year’s GDC, is already available in Unreal Engine 4.20 – don’t be surprised if we get a little more realistic human characters in the next year or so in those games which use this game engine: „Almost everybody that has a digital human character in their game is taking advantage of Siren. All the skin shading work we did that was taken into Siren shipped with 4.20. There’s a bunch of stuff that I probably can’t mention yet. As always, the facial animation and facial modelling experts are making their work better and better. I think you’ll see some pretty exciting stuff over the next 12 months. Although there are some pretty—the nice thing is we ship Unreal Engine with the source code. We’re not the only people writing shaders. People have done work themselves with the code. There’s some skin stuff that, as I say, I can’t disclose, but I’ve seen some pretty amazing stuff out there.”

So, Epic Games thinks there will be a massive improvement. Should we believe them…?

Source: WCCFTech