Mova’s Contour Reality Capture system ready for photo-realistic next-gen

Excited about what next-gen will bring us now that it seems visuals on current generation consoles can’t get any better? The motion-capture company Mova has something in store that will make pre-rendered scenes difficult to distinguish from real-time. Learn more at the full article.

While we still enjoy the beautiful visuals of today’s hardware, the motion capture company Mova is preparing for the next generation by introducing the most accurate motion-capture system to date. Using cameras instead of reflective balls to actually capture actors, facial models whose polygon count reach 100,000 can be rendered in real-time.

To demonstrate, Mova revealed footage produced by its so called Contour Reality Capture system running on Epic Games‘ Unreal Engine 3 at the Game Developers Conference 2008. “This pushes Unreal Engine 3 to its very limit… it’s about as photo-real as you can get in real time,” said Mova founder Steve Perlman.

Unfortunately, according to Perlman, we won’t be seeing photo-realistic real-time scenes powered by the Contour Reality Capture this generation. He told Joystiq:

You can see the difference then between what’s achievable in cinema and what’s achievable right now in video games. But next generation game machines, they’ll be able to essentially show in real time what we can do currently in non-real-time using renderers. … Next generation, you’re going to have interactive sequences where people think there’s a live person in the game.

You can check out Mova’s Contour Reality Capture system in action in the video below.