Boston Digital Media Summit, day 2

I am at the second day of the Boston Digital Media Summit at Boston College, and have seen a lot of great demos as well as interesting discussions about virtual worlds, games, and potential educational applications in 3D, computer-generated environments (the theme of this year's summit is Immersive Education).

One of the most amazing things to observe is how far the graphics have come in just a few years. Less than two years ago, I presented at the "SIGGRAPH summit," which was the first installment of the Boston Digital Media Summit, held at Boston City Hall. The most impressive graphics on display were the demos by Jeff Kleiser, a professional visual effects artist who has worked on Tron, the X-Men movies, theme park installations, and television commercials. The games-based demos, including mine (I showed a machinima called The French Democracy), were far more limited -- textures were rough, character movements could be jerky, lighting was simplistic.

Not anymore. One of the BC students showed a demo of Crysis, an FPS that depicts a series of commando attacks in the year 2020. The graphics were stunning, albeit processor-intensive (it was set up on a custom PC running some major graphics hardware). Plants have always been tough to model in 3D, which I suppose is one of the reasons why even professional 3D CGI animation seems to prefer to environments that don't have plants -- witness Cars, Ice Age, and Pororo: The Little Penguin. Not with Crysis. A large part of it is set in a jungle, and the movements of the plants was very realistic -- the leaves were individually rendered, the physics of characters or other objects brushing against them was convincing, and even the little breezes that moved the leaves on individual branches of a bush looked like the real thing. It would be a stretch to call it photorealistic -- the mouths of the players still need work -- but photorealism is definitely on the horizon. I would embed a trailer in this blog, but the ones that are available are violent. You can see some Crysis trailers here; note that all are rated M.

I am joining one panel in the mid afternoon, and giving a presentation at the end of the day. The title of the presentation is "Grokking Generation G: Digital Media and the Video Game Generation," and gets into the demographic and technology trends that will impact the development and consumption of 3D media in the coming years. It's the third presentation I've given this week (I gave two earlier this week on online communities and video production at work) and the panel will be the second one I've participated in, after the discussions at the Social Media Club Boston event at Bentley College on Thursday night. After this is over, I can take a little breather -- I don't have any public speaking engagements scheduled for the next few months.