how many years until real-life graphics come out?

Question

How many years in your experiences do you think it will take for computer graphics in flight simulators for instance, to appear as real as what we see thru our eyes? The graphics these days are getting better, but you can tell its computer graphics as opposed to seeing something on TV and know its a movie, the news, or whatever. How long will it take until 3d graphics look like for instance, watching a movie? 5 years? 500 years?

Answer 1

well the current rate is technology doubbles every 2 years, so take the best looking game out there, make the graphics twice as good and thats what it should look like in 2 years, doubbles it again 4 years, doubble it again 6 years and so on ect.... personaly im waiting for it to be like the matrix where we plug our self in to a alternet universe, only in this ( unlike the matrix ) you cant die in real life

Answer 2

So that thing mr_gees said about technology doubling every two years is called Moore's law, which states technology for printin on silicon is doubled every two years and therefore the level of processing power, motherboard speed etc. is increased by two. However this doesn't necessarily apply to graphics, it just means that better graphics can come closer to the middle class and lower class sooner. Michio Kaku estimats we may have photorealistic graphics as soon as 2018, but most likly they will come out closer to 2024. Additionally photoreal graphics doesn't necessarily mean trillions of pixels to one in game object. At a certain point the human eye will either not detect, or simply not distinguish between the two, so while what gaara said is technically true, we will probably get close enough that it doesn't matter much more quickly. Sorry for all my bad english btw, my new laptop has a terrible keyboard. Hope I answered your question

Answer 3

I dare say within 15 years. The problem though is that game graphics are done by artist. If you want interaction then you need programming. That is a lot of work. Also note that although many people are good artist, not many of them can do realism. That is a specialty upon itself. There are too many things that must go on to make something look realistic. FOr that you have to fool the human brain which is a very hard thing to do believe it or not. They can probably make something look realistic right now but they must also make it behave realistic which is very very hard. Your brain will pick up on minor subtleties.

Look at it this way. You play a game where a guy is walking around. The guy goes inside a store like a gas station mini mart. To make that look realistic every object must be rendered to look real. That is a lot of art and a lot of programing. To be completely realistic you should be able to pick up any object and make it behave like in real life. That is evry object, from gum, to milk juggs to magazines. The object would have to do everything the player can imagine. Also, the people there would have to behave like humans. A lot of times in games like these you see people waiting in line. You can walk up to them and push them around. The avatar then would react to some preset action. A human is different. A human may react in fear or anger or who knows. There would be some level of unpredictability. Again, that is a lot of programming and work. It simply defeats the purpose of the game. The idea is to have a representation of what is going on in order to tell a story. All those details a lot of times do not add much more to it. Then there is the cost factor. The more realistic the game the more it is going to cost to make. It is a big risk to the developer to put so much effort. What if the game is not successful. The developer looses a lot of money. So, what they do is get to the point to where it is good enough.

One thing I have done is to follow characters around in the grand theft auto series games. The A.I. in that game is very interesting. A person just keeps on walking, pretty much at random. They go from point A to point B. Once they get there they then choose a new point and go there. They never really get anywhere they just wonder around. Cars are the same in that game. I mean they could had made it so that a person drives a car and gets to a restaurant and eats. Then they go to work and a few hours later drives home. That would make it more realistic but it is uneccesary because most people will not follow non playable characters around. It is good enough to make them look as if they where headed somewhere even though in reality they aren't

Answer 4

Most likely nowhere in the near future, I mean we have come a long way from a few pixels to trillions and trillions of pixels, textures, polygons, various techniques of shading and such, but the sheer immensity of the detail in real life is still a long ways before realization. Plus the best CG movies/cutscenes and such are still a ways before it can be indifferent from real life albeit certain things looking identical to stuff in real life like maybe the sky or a landscape from a distance.

Answer 5

This is a question I am all too interested in.

If we want to look at it from a technical point of view, it will never happen, because only 'real life' can be 'real life'. There is simply too much detail in the real world to map out into a computer.

Although, don't let that disappoint you, because we can always ignore the extreme details and get away with what appears to be very realistic. We have already achieved what appears to be 'photo realism' in the computer graphics world. In fact, we achieved it a long time ago. The only problem now is, how do we run it in real time, so we can use it in games.

This question is hard to tell, because we need to know exactly how realistic we want the graphics to be. There are X number of things that makes something realistic, firstly, the texture, the model (and/or bumpmap), the animation and the lighting. Sure I probably missed a few points, but these are the most important things. As you've probably already noticed, computer games already have all of these things.

The increasing power of the computer from year to year is known as the Moore's law. I don't know the exact mathematics, but it basically states that computers get double-times stronger every year. From this, we could assume that graphics double every year, and, with more efficient rendering techniques, it's possible that it could be more than double.

However, the Moore's law won't exist forever, a new generation computer, known as the 'Quantum Computer' will be so powerful that Moore's law will no longer be accurate at determining the increasing power of the computer.

When quantum computers come out, then I can guarantee graphics will go from 'good', to 'best'. The reason why quantum computers can process to fast is because of the fact that they work on the quantum scale.

I can't say anything that I've said is accurate, it is more or less my opinion, but if I had to guess, I'd say in 2020-2030, you can expect virtual reality (i.e. awsome graphics+3D stereo rendering (without glasses).

3D monitors are already available however, so it's mainly processor power that needs to be updated.

So yeah, 2020-2030 will be the revolution in graphics.

A lot of people say that 'it depends on the artist'. This is true, but only to a certain extent.

Once graphics become more and more realistic (taking more and more time to make), games will no longer hire artists to make every element in a game, but instead, companies will rise which specialize in providing 3D objects which can be imported into the game. Yes, such services already exist, however, in the future, I can guarantee these services will be much more important. For example, lets say we wanted a certain species of a 'Palm Tree', the computer game creators would buy this 'Palm Tree' from this service. The Palm Tree itself would have it's own algorithm as to how it looks, meaning that every palm tree planted in the game would look different. In other words, there would be no point of modeling a palm tree, if realistic palm trees already exist. My point is, in the future, everything will be made by these services. Ground textures that are generated randomly, skin textures which already have lighting properties, age properties, color properties etc. So basically, games will still take the same amount of time to make, so it's not impossible.

The reason why these services aren't so important now is because, we haven't reached the point where we can recycle objects in games. Look at it this way for example, if every game had the exact same grass texture it would be VERY noticeable. In the future however, the grass could have properties, such as color, length, species, etc. The programmers would only have to choose a random property for the grass. So in other words, every single game on the planet could be using the same grass, provided by the same company, but it would look different in every game!

The reason why I'm telling you this, is because, currently, most computer games are made from scratch (artists working for the game company make just about everything for the game). People tend to think that it will be too much work to make realistic graphics for every aspect of the game. This is true, HOWEVER, that doesn't mean it is impossible. If graphics get better and better, the artists would need to get better and better (as well as faster), not to mention, these developers would need MANY artists to finish a realistic looking game. Why is this important? Because it would be impossible. Which is exactly why these services would NEED to exist in the first place. And, just like in real life, grass = grass. The fact that your grass looks different to your next door neighbors grass, doesn't mean one is grass, and one is not. They are simply different species with different properties based on many different things.

Ok, I will stop talking about grass.

As for AI, AI is a very hard thing to make. The above poster mentioned how characters in the game do not 'need' to be walking to a specific area, as long as they are walking somewhere then it will appear to be realistic. This is true, but, if the above poster noticed that the people walk around in circles, then how can it be realistic. To be honest, I did the exact same thing in GTA.

I think that a game which gives you the freedom to see why things happen is very important. I can't say this problem will ever be fixed, but sure enough, AI will get better.

Currently, most games do not have good AI. In fact, most characters don't even have 0.0001% the AI that us humans have. Why? Because it's a lot of programming, it's difficult, and it's possible we would get the exact same results.

AI in games is basically cheated on by game developers. I myself make computer game (though nothing to compare to commercial games). AI is basically programmed to do exactly what you EXPECT it to do. They are not programmed to 'think' like we do.

Currently, the best AI ever created (not for a computer game) is equivalent to a retarded cockroach, as quoted by a famous professor. So think about it, when you play your computer game, think about the cockroach, and then think about the AI in the game. The AI certainly seems to act human, but fact is, it is only doing what the programmers told it to do.

I can not guess how long it will take us to make real human equivalent AI. Such a thing will be very difficult, because, there are so many thing you need to take into account.

How do you program common sense? How do you make AI to recognize what it see's as pixels? How do you make an AI that knows the difference between something that is said seriously, and sarcastically?

I guess in the end, real AI may not be needed in games to make it realistic, but one things for sure, programmers will need to improve on how AI's react to certain situations. Who knows, maybe a service will exist where game developers can import a library of all the possible situations an AI bot could face so that the bot could react as realistically as possible. Who knows.

Right now, the best way to make a realistic bot is to simply watch it, notice what makes it look 'unrealistic', and fix it to give the illusion that it really is thinking, when in fact, it is not.

EDIT: Wow, I didn't realize I typed to much. I better shut up now.

Answer 6

I think it'll come in the year 1955