https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/04/22/can-the-world-be-simulated
"On a warm afternoon last fall, Steven Caron, a technical artist at the
video-game company Quixel, stood at the edge of a redwood grove in the Oakland
Hills. “Cross your eyes, kind of blur your eyes, and get a sense for what’s
here,” he instructed. There was a circle of trees, some logs, and a wooden
fence; two tepee-like structures, made of sticks, slumped invitingly. Quixel
creates and sells digital assets—the objects, textures, and landscapes that
compose the scenery and sensuous elements of video games, movies, and TV shows.
It has the immodest mission to “scan the world.” In the past few years, Caron
and his co-workers have travelled widely, creating something like a digital
archive of natural and built environments as they exist in the early
twenty-first century: ice cliffs in Sweden; sandstone boulders from the
shrublands of Pakistan; wooden temple doors in Japan; ceiling trim from the
Bożków Palace, in Poland. That afternoon, he just wanted to scan a redwood
tree. The ideal assets are iconic, but not distinctive: in theory, any one of
them can be repeated, like a rubber stamp, such that a single redwood could
compose an entire forest. “Think about more generic trees,” he said, looking
around. We squinted the grove into lower resolution.
Quixel is a subsidiary of the behemoth Epic Games, which is perhaps best known
for its blockbuster multiplayer game
Fortnite. But another of Epic’s core
products is its “game engine”—the software framework used to make games—called
Unreal Engine. Video games have long bent toward realism, and in the past
thirty years engines have become more sophisticated: they can now render
near-photorealistic graphics and mimic real-world physics. Animals move a lot
like animals, clouds cast shadows, and snow falls more or less to expectations.
Sound bounces, and moves more slowly than light. Most game developers rely on
third-party engines like Unreal and its competitors, including Unity.
Increasingly, they are also used to build other types of imaginary worlds,
becoming a kind of invisible infrastructure. Recent movies like “Barbie,” “The
Batman,” “Top Gun: Maverick,” and “The Fabelmans” all used Unreal Engine to
create virtual sets. In 2022, Epic gave the Sesame Workshop a grant to scan the
sets for “Sesame Street.” Architects now make models of buildings in Unreal.
NASA uses it to visualize the terrain of the moon. Some Amazon warehouse
workers are trained in part in gamelike simulations; most virtual-reality
applications rely on engines. “It’s really coming of age now,” Tim Sweeney, the
founder and C.E.O. of Epic Games, told me. “These little ‘game engines,’ as we
called them at the time, are becoming simulation engines for reality.”"
Via
Fix the News:
<
https://fixthenews.com/good-news-global-life-expectancy-domestic-violence-australia-emissions-china/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
