For now it's the results of present day motion capture that concern me, and I don't see much difference between motion captured effects in some games, and the awful predictability of character movement in video-based games like Phantasmagoria , or the Daedulus Encounter . Hello, I am Tia Carrere in a small green screen studio, but I will pretend to move and act as if I am in a big space ship. There's a lot you can do with simple 2D video and photography to create compelling 3D models. Techimage can take a video of an actor's face, creates a 3D model without wires, and markers, and then export the motion data to a third party application for rendering. It's pretty cool.
Character acting in games can make the difference between a good and great game.
There are only so many ways you can blow something up, but give people a character they can laugh at or identify with and you have a hook. Real3D has a great setup, RealScan 3D, that uses a laser scanner to capture complex texture and geometric data from any real world object. They did my head at one demonstration, and every distortion was perfectly replicated. I didn't know there was an algorithm that could do a curve like that, but there is. And it was quick.