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Photorealistic rendering of GTA V – via AI

Photorealistic rendering of GTA V – via AI

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Old games often suffer from the limited graphics capabilities of the time they were made, while developing new games costs a fortune due to the requirements to author high quality models and textures. What if you could solve BOTH problems – with the same solution? A machine learning project from Intel Labs in 2021 called “Enhancing Photorealism Enhancement” might push rendering toward photorealism a lot quicker and easier.

Researchers studied how to use a convolution network to re-render the scene. Below you can see an example of how they used the CityScapes dataset to give a much more realistic output of a race game – all in realtime.

You can read how the image enhancement actually works in their paper (PDF). It includes a lot of good information about how their method works and how it improves on previous attempts that have issues with color, object hallucination, and temporal instability. They do this by using the extra information provided by rendered scenes such as clever use of the g-buffer – along with a specialized discriminator and segmentation network.

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Listening to the ancient past

Listening to the ancient past

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Equator AI created a video series that answers the question of what ancient languages sounded like. They even tackle some purely reconstructed proto-languages like Indo-European that was re-built from later derived (but documented) Indo-European languages.

The first video demonstrates Old Norse, Latin, Old English, Proto-Celtic, Phoenician, Hittite, and Akkadian. I can affirm the Latin is understandable but has an interesting accent. We do actually have some idea of how things were pronounced in Latin, because ancient documents exist that gave pronunciation guides or even (in a mirror of modern grammar Nazi’s) complained about common pronunciation errors.

This second video shows off Proto-Indo-European, Sabaic, Sanskrit, Aramaic (bonus points for the video character looking like Jesus), Sumerian, Old Chinese, Ge’ez, and Gothic.

Since it is all AI generated, it seems like it would be an interesting way of adding authentic language pronunciation to games about the past. Imagine playing Civilization and having each of the ancient leaders speaking their actual languages.

If you like this, maybe give learning Latin a try.

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Classic ghost stories in VR

Classic ghost stories in VR

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One area in which VR seems to land well is scary experiences. Everything from walking on a tiny plank hundreds of feet in the air, to madness, to the isolation of space.

As a lover of classic ghost stories from the Edwardian and Victorian eras, I applaud this attempt by Abi Salvesen to retell H.G. Wells’ The Red Room as a VR experience.

Give it a watch. Or curl up with a cup of warm drink, start a fire, and give an audio version a listen.

The Low Res car

The Low Res car

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“It’s like a child’s backyard project”. The cool looking unibody design shakes and rattles, only goes about 12mph, has no heater/AC, isn’t practical, but there it is and it turns heads since it’s basically an art car.

It’s part of the Peterson automotive museum which is worth checking out.

The Thing infection order

The Thing infection order

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The 1982 movie The Thing is one of my favorite sci-fi/horror movies – right up there with Aliens. It a paranoia fueled mystery of a alien organism that can assimilate and imitate both human or animal hosts. 

Based on the 1938 story Who Goes There by John W. Campbell Jr, The Thing takes us along into the fear and paranoia of an isolated Antarctic research station with the characters trying to ascertain whether everyone is who they say they are.

What makes it so re-watchable is that the timeline when certain characters are assimilated is unclear. Filmmaker John Carpenter even used stand-ins so that the shadows were not easily identifiable. This has lead to years of speculation and fan theories (Clothing continuity theory, Molotov whiskey theory, No breath theory, Who sabotaged the blood bank) about what happened when.

Of all of them, I think the Den of Geek does the best breakdown of the most likely order that each of the characters succumbs to the thing.