IEEE Spectrum June, 2014 - 50

photo-realistically lifelike digital human.
Such a digital double will change the way
we think about actors, acting, entertainment, and computer games. In movies,
digital doubles already replace human
actors on occasion, sometimes just for
moments, sometimes for most of a feature
film. Within a decade or so, computergame characters will be as indistinguishable from filmed humans as their movie
counterparts. And in time, this capability
will help bring movies and games together,
and out of the union will come entirely
new forms of entertainment.
This blurring of the real and the digital
became possible in movies recently when
moviemakers reached a long-anticipated
milestone: They crossed the "uncanny
valley." The term has been used for
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years to describe a problem faced by those
using computer graphics to depict realistic
human characters. When these creations
stopped looking cartoonish and started
approaching photo-realism, the characters somehow began to seem creepy rather
than endearing. Some people speculated
that the problem could never be solved;
now it has proved to be just a matter of
research and computing power.
Producing a fully realistic digital double
is still fantastically expensive and timeconsuming. It's cheaper to hire even
George Clooney than it is to use computers to generate his state-of-the-art digital
double. However, the expense of creating
a digital double is dependent on the costs
of compute power and memory, and these
costs will inevitably fall. Then, by all ac-

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CloCkwise from top: Christopher polk/Getty imaGes; aCtivision r&D/UsC iCt; alamy

aCroSS The Valley: A digital re-creation of the late rapper Tupac Shakur performed at the 2012
Coachella festival [top], Brad Pitt's digital double aged dramatically in the 2008 movie The Curious Case
of Benjamin Button [bottom left], and researchers at the University of Southern California's Institute for
Creative Technologies have created a strikingly realistic virtual human, Digital Ira [bottom right].

counts, digital entertainment will enter a
period of fast and turbulent change. An
actor's performance will be separable
from his appearance; that is, an actor will
be able to play any character-short, tall,
old, or young. Some observers also foresee a new category of entertainment,
somewhere between movies and games,
in which a work has many plotted story
lines and the viewer has some freedom to
move around within the world of the story.
Creators of entertainment also dream
that technology will someday make itself
invisible. Instead of painstakingly using
cameras and computers to share their
visions, they hope to be able to directly
share the rich worlds of their imaginations
using a form of electronic mind reading far
more sophisticated than the brain-scan
technology of today: If you can think it,
you will be able to make someone see it.
"That is the future I wish for-where the
hard edges of technology disappear and we
return to magic," says Alexander McDowell,
a professor at the University of Southern
California's School of Cinematic Arts.
That magic means not only being able
to step inside a realistic virtual world
without the cumbersome-and, for some,
nauseating-head-mounted screens that
create virtual experiences today. It means
being able to seamlessly merge the real and
the virtual, to allow computer-generated
beings to walk among real humans.
"I want to be able to jump down the rabbit hole-not just metaphorically, not just
visually, but really jump inside" a story or
virtual experience, says Tawny Schlieski,
a research scientist at Intel Labs. "And I
want the rabbit to follow me home."
Today's world of moviemaking-in which
realistic computer-generated humans
are an option, albeit an expensive one-
was hard to imagine just 10 years ago.
In 2004, the state-of-the-art computergenerated human was a creepily cartoonish Tom Hanks in The Polar Express. And
the uncanny valley seemed an impossibly
wide chasm.

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum June, 2014