Facial Modeling in Gaming

Just as a segue from the Quake 4 trailer, it is *amazing* to see how realistic game characters are now. From a purely subjective point of view, I'd say that Quake 4's Matthew Kane (shown above) looks far more realistic than, say, j-pop idol Ayumi Hamasaki:

Granted, it's not really fair to use Ayumi Hamasaki as a counterpoint, given how much she's been plasticized and photoshopped, but nevertheless, it's really amazing that id has managed to render such life-like models, since the brain is notoriously good at detecting anomalies in facial images. As a matter of fact, this ability is hard-wired into the brain at the cellular level (see neato diagram).

So, just as a question, wouldn't it be interesting to see if there's a critical point where people are physiologically unable to distinguish between a real person and an AI model? I mean, of course people aren't tricked by a low-resolution 500-polygon wireframe, but what if we raise the polycount to 4000? 5000? 10000? A quick search on Pubmed uncovers a bunch of interesting articles (see postscript) but none of them really focus on image degredation, either from a lossy compression / 3D modeling point of view.

Anyway, very interesting topic -- shall be sure to look into it later in more depth.

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1. Allison, T. et al. Face recognition in human extrastriate cortex. J. Neurophysiol. 71, 821-825 (1994). | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort 
2. Haxby, J. V. et al. The functional organization of human extrastriate cortex: A PET-RCBF study of selective attention to faces and locations. J. Neurosci. 14, 6336-6353 (1994). | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort 
3. Kanwisher, N., McDermott, J. & Chun, M.M. The fusiform face area: A module in human extrastriate cortex specialized for face perception. J. Neurosci. 17, 4302-4311 (1997). | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort 
4. McCarthy, G., Puce, A., Gore, J. C. & Allison, T. Face-specific processing in the human fusiform gyrus. J. Cogn. Neurosci. 9, 605-610 (1997). | ISI 
5. Puce, A., Allison, T., Asgari, M. Gore, J. C. & McCarthy, G. Face-sensitive regions in extrastriate cortex studied by functional MRI. Neurophysiology 74, 1192-1199 (1996).
6. Sergent, J., Otha, S. & MacDonald, B. Functional neuroanatomy of face and object processing. Brain, 115, 15-36 (1992). | PubMed | ISI 
7. Gauthier, I. & Tarr, M.J. Becoming a 'Greeble' expert: Exploring the face recognition mechanisms. Vision Res. 37, 1673-1682 (1997). | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort