Photorealism - the future of video game visuals

Gaming visuals are entering a new era of realistic physical rendering. We speak to graphics hardware specialist Nvidia about what this means

Imagine looking into the eyes of a video game character and knowing that they have lied to you, or that they're scared, or that they love you.

Right now, even with the astonishing power of current multi-core processors and graphics chipsets, the people we encounter in visually beautiful games like Far Cry 4, Assassin's Creed: Unity and Tomb Raider lack something in their faces, some spark of humanity. The phenomenon has a well-known name, the Uncanny Valley, coined by robotics professor Masahiro Mori. His hypothesis, first put forward in 1970, was that as human reproductions get closer to authenticity, the tiny inaccuracies become increasingly disturbing. Video game characters look so real, but not real enough, and we recoil from them.