A New Light for the Graphical Adventure?

Rendering Synthetic Objects into Legacy Photographs from Kevin Karsch on Vimeo.

This mind-boggling technical demonstration from Kevin Karsch et al. from UIUC shows just how far algorithmic interpretation of imagery has come. The possible uses for it are many and varied, but the potential for games has really piqued my interest.

The age of the point-and-click adventure has come and gone, but many will remember fondly the days of Monkey Island, Space Quest, and Gabriel Knight. The defining characteristics of the genre were simple enough: a linear, narrative-led journey through a series of static locations with interactive puzzle elements that had to be completed in order to progress to new locations. With such a limited mechanic it wasn’t the gameplay elements that we loved — in fact they were often obscure and frustrating to the point that they spawned an entire industry of premium-rate help phone services — it was the stories and the sense of immersion that the intricately-crafted settings offered.

Of course, static locations, no matter how elegantly-rendered, were a limitation of hardware capability that vanished with the advent of real-time 3D. From the moment that Wolfenstein and Doom appeared on the scene the days of the point-and-click as the dominant gaming genre were numbered.

The thing that really captures my imagination about Karsch’s technology, then, is how simply it could be used to generate photo-realistic point-and-click adventures from photographic source material. Want to recreate the black-and-white horror of WWI trenches without employing several dozen artists and animators for a couple of years? Or the gothic majesty of 1930’s New York? Grab your source photos, spend ten minutes setting up the geometry of the scene with this software, then drop in your 3D interactive elements and you’ve got the basics of a game engine with a visual fidelity that current top-end 3D engines would be hard-pressed to rival.