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Yes, but this is a cutscene isn't it?

One of the major points was that they had an actress mimic the facial expressions (and used motion capture for it), and voice actors to "act" the scene.

That doesn't translate to gameplay.

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Most 3d games use pre-rendered geometry when avatars walk around swing swords etc. Being able to add highly accurate facial movements to those animations increases realism without needing all that much data relative to modern hardware. And unlike simple video clips you can meld these things into the rest of the games geometry so say a grunts cheek would react reasonably as they lifted their AK to fire on you.

Take it a step further - whether people data-mine and generalize the human motions and expressions or, just cleverly used fixed 'patches' of behavior, well, imagine now using them in live robots. /That/ will be an Uncanny Valley :)

This is not a 'cutscene' in the pre-rendered-and-then-compressed-as-video sense. The site clearly states that it was rendered in realtime: it is a very short path to interactivity.

Interactivity implies that the system be able to reproduce realistic facial expressions in response to the ongoing action without doing motion capture of a live actress.

It's not so obvious to me that the path from this scene to that is very short.

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