drip, drip, drip
nytimes.com
August 16, 1999
Computing Power Puts Video Games in Television's League
By JOHN MARKOFF
BURNABY, British Columbia -- Liam Neeson, meet Eddie Pope.
Pope, a player for Major League Soccer's D.C. United team, may not be as well known as Neeson. But both men are stars in blockbuster high-technology features that have each earned well over $200 million.
In Pope's case, though, the feature is not a big summer film like "Star Wars: Episode I -- The Phantom Menace" but a best-selling video game: FIFA Soccer, currently the most popular title from Electronic Arts Inc., the world's largest maker of video games. Pope spent a day here in the company's new $3.2-million motion-capture studio in early August, going through his moves for the next version of the game.
Thanks in part to technologies like motion capture, video games are expanding beyond their male teen-age stronghold into an increasingly mainstream form of entertainment. In fact, the $6.3-billion North American computer and video game industry is closing in on Hollywood box-office revenues, which reached $6.95 billion last year.
"Entertainment is the 6,000-pound gorilla in the American home," said Nicholas Donatiello, president of Odyssey, a San Francisco market research firm. "Motion capture is important because it adds more interesting experiences that will broaden the reach of the game industry."
To improve the reality in virtual reality, producers of popular video games -- whether sports titles like FIFA Soccer and Activision's Jack Nicklaus game or fantasy shooter games like Eidos Interactive's Tomb Raider series -- have turned to human actors like Pope. Last year, for example, Westwood Studios used motion capture sequences from more than 100 actors for its video-game version of the movie "Blade Runner," including many of the film's original cast members.
And among the game makers, access to increasing computing power for both video games and PC's is touching off a new race toward realism. In this latest version of FIFA Soccer, for instance, the producers were able to increase the video speed to 26 frames a second for the Sony Playstation from 21. In comparison, conventional television runs at 30 frames a second, while most movies are shown at 24 frames a second.
"We're at the point where the visual resolution of our products will soon surpass television," said Don Mattrick, a software game pioneer who is now head of the Electronic Arts production studios. "That will take our products into mainstream culture."
Electronic Arts, which uses motion capture for more than a dozen sports titles and many of its other games, is seen as the leader in this field -- in aesthetics as well as in technology.
"You have to put motion capture in a larger context," said Steve Eshkenazi, a veteran video game analyst who is now a partner at Walden Media and Information, a technology and media investment fund in San Francisco. "Electronic Arts understands that it won't replace great game play, but they have developed the ability to create digital actors to enhance the game brands they have created."
Although Electronic Arts is a Silicon Valley company, with headquarters in San Mateo, Calif., its production studio is in this suburb of Vancouver, British Columbia, which is also home to a thriving film industry. It was here, in the early 1980s, that Mattrick founded Distinctive Software, one of the first PC game companies, which was acquired by Electronic Arts in 1985.
Because much of the company's production talent was already based here, Electronic Arts built its new studio in Burnaby last year rather than ask its programmers and artists to move to San Mateo. Already, the company says, the Burnaby studio is the most productive and profitable of the dozen development studios the company has scattered among five countries.
Capturing the raw material of FIFA Soccer resembles shooting a scene for an action film. Garbed in a black body suit dotted with silver reflective spheres the size of table tennis balls, Pope looks like an alien. On a 40-square-foot patch of real grass that has been laid in the studio for the day's shoot, he goes through his moves, performing headers and deeks (soccer jargon for feints or fakes). Strobe lights pulse 240 times a second as 10 specially designed high-resolution cameras break Pope's fluid moves into digital snapshots.
While he kicks soccer balls into a net, two programmers watch through the large window separating the studio from their control room as Pope's motion data stream into a row of Silicon Graphics work stations and other machines.
On one monitor a small cluster of lights moves like a balletic constellation of stars, tracking the player's movements as an assistant tosses him a ball. Pope performs a slashing header, then falls and rolls on a cushioned mat. Next, imagining a winning goal scored, he springs up and bounds away in a celebratory run, arms spread like an airplane, as if ready to hug an unseen teammate.
Almost immediately, the work station has translated this sequence into movements depicted by a three-dimensional stick figure that repeats the header, roll and victory dance -- the kinetic architectural framework on which computer graphics artists will build a video animation mimicking Pope's athleticism.
All this comes from no more than 20 points of light on the screen, which have extracted the essence of his motion and given the stick figure dance a remarkably lifelike fluidity. The digital motion-capture files will now become the raw material for game designers whose job it is to extend the illusion by enhancing the skeletal renderings with flesh, clothing and facial expressions.
"Your eye is remarkably sensitive to motion," said David Pierce, a special effects engineer who manages the studio. "It creates a powerful illusion."
Although motion capture technology was invented in the 1970s, it was not until the early '90s that the processing power of video game consoles began making it worth the cost and effort of recording human movements for games. Current consoles from Sony, Nintendo and Sega use 32-bit processors, and all three companies have faster 64-bit consoles in the wings.
The Electronic Arts FIFA team is eagerly awaiting this next generation of machines, like the Sony Playstation II, which will be introduced in Japan later this year. On that machine, the number of polygons -- elements in the basic wire mesh used to create three-dimensional human figures available to programmers -- will exceed 10,000 for an individual figure, compared with 250 polygons a player on current consoles. With that level of resolution, programmers would be able to depict movement in a soccer player's hair as he or she runs.
But even with the current generation of game consoles, Electronic Arts programmers are finding new ways to enhance the illusory effects. FIFA 2000, to be released in November, relies heavily on Pope's on-field movements, for example, but it also exploits the more subliminal component of sound in an effort to make game players feel that they are actually in a stadium watching a game in progress.
By the time it is ready for release this fall, the new version will use the recorded words of 27 different announcers in nine languages speaking 85,000 scripted words. Different disks will be sold in different countries.
The three programmers responsible for sound and music are seeking a leap in realism by using only complete prerecorded phrases; in the past, the game's announcers have sounded robotic as certain phrases are patched together from a library of words.
Moreover, the game will add predictive speech by the announcers -- phrases like "waiting in the middle cross" that anticipate the action -- as well as sentences indicating an awareness of earlier developments in the game. The number of goals a player has already scored, for example, might prompt the programmed announcer to say, "Ah! He's made his hat trick!" when the player scores a third one.
The sound designers have also programmed in more crowd chants and various spectator sounds that will be more responsive to the game in progress. As Kerry Whalen, one of the FIFA producers, observed, "If you just scored your 19th goal against Lichtenstein, the crowd isn't going to be very excited." |
