Most of the ARKit apps that I’ve tried didn’t look realistic, more like cartoon looking. Today I had a chance to play with CSR Racing 2’s new AR mode. I actually took my iPad to test it outdoors and see how it’s like.
The app spawns a photorealistic 3D car model that blended so well with the real environment that it was hard to tell that it is virtual. That moment was really unique. I even remember moving my head down a bit when I moved to see the inner part of the car. Of course, there was no reason to, because it was a virtual car, not a real car.
This wasn’t a game or anything and there wasn’t any type of physical interaction with the 3D model. That being said, I was still very thrilled to see how amazing the experience is when a 3D model blends so well with the environment. This is why I think that photorealism will play a significant role in AR experiences. Still, the current technology is still no there. For example, the reflections on the car are pre-rendered and don’t reflect the real world environment. The lighting still didn’t look perfect and even though the car blended well, you can still tell it’s a virtual car. Furthermore, I don’t think current processors can handle lots of photorealistic high-poly rendering with real-time lighting effects and shadows. If it was the case, we probably would have seen anti-aliasing with the car rendering, but that wasn’t the case.
Photorealism can help increase immersion. I remember how ecstatic I was when I first experiment with the app Vixeo AR Movie Maker. The rendering wasn’t photorealistic, but that’s the first time I actually got to see a close to photorealistic objects being part of the real world and I enjoyed it a lot.
I think that cars just turn to blend well in the environment and impress the viewer because of the reflections. I’ve seen that in car racing games with puddles on the racing track and the high-reflective shader on the car themselves. However, until we are going to get real-time environment reflections, it won’t be overwhelmy impressive.
To create highly immersive AR apps, the app should be able to interact with real objects in the physical world. The thing is that if it can generate a virtual object that appears very realistic, it might work the same way, even better, because developers can manipulate the virtual object, but they can do it with the real ones.
When ARKit will be able to detect vertical surfaces, we will be able to experience much more reliable and authentic experiences because virtual objects could react to collision with walls and other vertical objects in the real world space.
Putting many photorealistic 3D objects in the AR scene will definitely require a lot of processing power. I don’t actually expect to see a game like this maybe two years from now.
CSR Racing 2 AR mode was just a taste of what we are going to see in the future. Just imagine being able to combine a photorealism scene and object with superb fluent animation into an AR game? I’ll be the first in line to play one of those games.
By the way, a few days ago I came across what suppose to be a scene from an upcoming game (no name yet), here take a look.
How about some surreal AR kungfu fighting? on your desk? @ARKitweekly @ARKitWorld @madewithARKit @ARKitNews @builtwithARCore @AugmentedReal @AugmentedAdvert pic.twitter.com/rYrY9rVNaS
— foolismoi (@foolismoi) November 17, 2017
Look at the animation, it packs so many frame rates and the rendering looks so good. I can’t wait to try it out.
I am not saying that we don’t get to play AR games with some high-quality visuals, of course, we’ll do, but there is a limit to what can be achieved with current technology.
I remember really enjoying seeing the great realistic texture quality of the monsters in HoloGrid: Monster Battle AR and the rocks in the game The Machines. Even with the version of ARKit and current devices we can still enjoy a high degree of photorealism rendering in some parts of apps and games.
I do think that photorealism will play a significant part as part of the effort of developers trying to make their AR experiences more authentic and engaging for their users. I also think that photorealism will be great in AR apps like IKEA Place where users can observe how home decor and furniture look in their home before buying it.
How important do you think is photorealism in Augmented Reality?