I was going to comment something like "yeah, yeah, everyone's an expert, it's easy to say you can spot the CGI once you've been told it's there", but then I looked at the video and... wow, that really is a pretty weak showing!
CGI Jensen looks like he came out of a 2009 videogame. Nvidia may have the tech but you can tell it lacks the artistic supervision of a proper VFX house so the end result looks like something their engineers put together in a last minute crunch (which is probably what happened).
https://www.cnet.com/news/lucasfilm-hires-deepfake-youtuber-...
They should have given the work to those VFX guys, Corridor crew would have done something much better in just couple of days.
For those who don’t want to watch all of it (even though it is quite excelent) the points I remember are:
- subsurface scattering of skin
- do the pores stretch? (As the face is moving)
- movement, especially movement of the upper lip as the character speaks
I really hate when movies throw in a CGI character expecting it to come off as real. It pulls you out of the movie in a way that normal over-the-top action CGI doesn't. I remember watching the recent Star Wars movies and being jerked out of the flow by CGI Princess Leah and some other characters (whoever the villainous old man was in that movie).
I'd be interested to see any videos of CGI faces that can fool experts.
There are videos from CGI artists, e.g. Corridor Crew, that break down really good CGI, which is almost entirely invisible to the non-expert eye. That is in fact the best kind of CGI: the one that enhances reality so seamlessly that it's almost impossible to pick apart. Quite entertaining and informative videos.
You're right that theres a possibility that someone is fooled and never finds out, and another possibility that someone is fooled, finds out later, and claims they never thought it was real. However, it is very clear that it's possible to be fooled and find out later.
So if any part of that falls into uncanny valley, the whole experience looks wrong.
Back when animations were done by hand, Disney's animators handled this by rotoscoping (drawing over...) live action, which created very convincing results even when the movements were exaggerated for effect.
Doing the same with CGI without a template is an unbelievably difficult challenge. It's much easier to create cartoonish exaggerations than to get spot-on perfect realism.
Youtuber Shamook did just that with the finale of the Mandalorian season 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrHXA2cSpNU
He actually got a job with ILM out of it. The future of CGI actors will probably involve a fusion of techniques like this in order to get it right.
There's a BTS video[1] about the animation on one episode, appears that it was a blend of both CGI + real faces.
The balls looked a bit odd in the film, but I figured it was simply an artifact of 23fps film capturing a small plastic ball moving at high speed. I never would have guessed it was all CGI. I think I'd seen the movie three times before buying the DVD and watching the special features, years later. So I was fooled in the mid-00s and again in the late 10s.
Also, I'd like to point out that Microsoft has skillfully choosen scenes that are "easy" to create: airplanes with smooth shapes, buildings from long distances and low detail, landscapes that don't include movement (no grass moving in the wind or waves lapping on the shore). MS set them selves up for success here.
And I agree that MS set themselves up for success with this type of scenery, it is fascinating how well the end result looks overall.
They actually say that’s what happened in the video on it.
Was in a breakout after the main Jensen presentation and the engineer was talking about how they were fiddling with K8s to get the demo to work right, the night before. And this was the money demo in the middle of the presentation.
On the other hand... I actually kind of like a company that half-asses demos. It suggests they're spending their time on more important things.
That's part of the point. If computer software alone can replicate state of the art human effort from 12 years ago, that's what they're showing off. It's not "look how great this rendering is", it's "look how good the AI that made this is".