Ye si know some of us of a certain web age thill think CGI is “Common Gateway Interface” and gets us this thinking in Perl and about $POST and $GET but CGI is now commonly known as Computer Generate Imagery. Thinks have certainly changed over the last few years with respect to what can actually be generated and just how good it has got.
Last night I saw the new Galaxy chocolate ad. Normally if there is some CGI my brain goes into how did they do that mode, travelling around the uncanny valley. However this ad I watched and thought wow that actress looks just like Audrey Hepburn. I did a quick google to find that it was Audrey Hepburn the CGI version. Now watching it again I can see that it is CGI, though not all the time.
The other ad doing the rounds that is obviously CGI, unless horses really can moonwalk is 3’s dancing pony. Strangely it is the real life bits that jar with me on this. The close in on what are model hooves is jarring compared to the smoothness of the rest of it.
It is nice to see 3 doing a pony dance mixer as a youtube application. It is a lot more Monty Python than slick CGI but its worth a few moments to have a go 🙂 Mine is here
What I saw today though whilst researching more about Holodecks was this great twist on the sort of building projection projects that animate entire cityscapes. Here the project canvas is a person. This is really brilliant I think. Lots of the images certainly stick with you after watching it. It works by scanning the person (who then sits very still) the scan informs the projector how to deliver and map the textures onto the surface. The same way designers use a 3d application and create a UV map of the textures and even baked lighting.
This is more blended reality at work 🙂 It is similar to how the Kinect performs some visual trickery on screen (not yet via projection but maybe soon) in things like Kinect Party
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