# Quantic Dream Tech Demo GDC 2012



## CyBeR (Mar 7, 2012)

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/gdc-2012-quantic-dream/727753

This is something really great in my opinion, enough to warrant a full topic for it. It would be awesome if this ended up as a full game eventually...heck, even an animation film would be damn awesome like this. 

Opinions?


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## Lenny (Mar 8, 2012)

For a year old, it looks very good. Indeed, as a whole, the technologies behind it are very exciting.

I think motion capture has been pretty much nailed over the past couple of years, thanks in no small part to games like the *Uncharted *series, and *Heavenly Sword*, and it's progressed to such a point that I don't think I can name any games that are due to be released, or came out recently, that don't use it.

Faces, however, are still new. Whilst the eyes in particular impressed me, and it's amazing that you can read the emotions of these animated characters in their faces, my major niggle is with the mouth - I've not seen anything yet that has created a mouth that moves naturally. As a brass player, I'm familiar with the sheer number of muscles that are around the mouth, and as a computer scientist, I can appreciate the difficulties with simulating them, but by now, I would expect mouths that don't look like the top lip is connected to the nose by an invisible, slightly too short piece of string, and I would expect the corners of the mouth to have more movement, even if it's more of a subtle shadow than true-to-life twitches.

Having not yet played *L.A. Noire* (I must confess that it's actually still in its wrapper on my shelf), the tech behind which *KARA *seems to actually use, I can't really compare the two properly, but from videos I've seen, I guess the final product is pretty similar (although I would expect KARA to have a slight advantage as there's no interaction with the scene, unlike a game).

But yeah, I'm impressed. There's room for improvement, but we saw that with *The Casting* tech demo they showed, and look at where things stand now.


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## Metryq (Mar 9, 2012)

It is impressive—spans the Uncanny Valley, even if the mouth is not perfect. (In _Westworld_ it was the joints in the hands.) MoCap is certainly a very efficient way of scripting complex and subtle animation. However, like voice "synthesizers" it is still a recording of the real world. How long till it is all completely computer generated?


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