photorealistic
Latest
NVIDIA AI turns crude doodles into photorealistic landscapes
Imagine if you had the power to turn your old-school Microsoft Paint doodles into actual art. Well, NVIDIA's latest AI-driven software can do just that. The GauGAN image creator, named after the French post-Impressionist painter, uses generative adversarial networks to transform even the crudest of sketches into a photorealistic landscape. NVIDIA describes the tech behind it, a deep learning AI trained on a million images, as a "smart paintbrush."
Video: Tele Atlas' photorealistic city models to aid navigation, terrorism
Navigation devices are everywhere and just keep getting better and better thanks to the 3D maps provided by the likes of Tele Atlas (owned by TomTom) and NAVTEQ (owned by Nokia). Now Tele Atlas is announcing its photorealistic "Advanced City Models" destined for in-car and portable navigation systems and mobile devices. In June, Tele Atlas will release 40 maps based on BLOM arial imagery for cities across Europe -- hundreds more cities, including those in North America and Asia, will be available in 2010. Remember, Google already has laid ink to paper to give it rights to Tele Atlas maps for use in Google's mobile, desktop, and on-line offerings. And with Tele Atlas maps loaded on PSPs and navigators from Pioneer, Mio, and of course TomTom, just think of this as a hint of what's to come.
The Daily Grind: Cartoony or Photorealistic?
As far as artistic game development goes, there appear to be 2 schools of thought: Expressionistic aesthetics allow the designers to better portray emotional states, or heighten the absurdity/drama of a moment; photorealism lets players immerse themselves more readily into a world that might be unfamiliar to them, and generates a stronger feeling of verisimilitude. Of course, your mileage may vary, but in general, these modes of thought hold.When it comes to MMOs, where an overarching story frequently takes a backseat to game mechanics, which style provides a better experience? Would WoW benefit from an overhaul of its graphics, making things more realistic-looking? Would EVE Online become a completely different game if everything were cel-shaded and anime-like?
