clipped from www.youtube.com _ clipped from technology.timesonline.co.uk Extraordinarily lifelike characters are to begin appearing in films and computer games thanks to a new type of animation technology. Emily – the woman in the above animation – was produced using a new modelling technology that enables the most minute details of a facial expression to be captured and recreated. She is considered to be one of the first animations to have overleapt a long-standing barrier known as ‘uncanny valley’ – which refers to the perception that animation looks less realistic as it approaches human likeness. “Ninety per cent of the work is convincing people that the eyes are real,” Mike Starkenburg, chief operating officer of Image Metrics, said. “The subtlety of the timing of eye movements is a big one. People also have a natural asymmetry – for instance, in the muscles in the side of their face. they are what makes people look real.” AMD last week released a new chip with a billion transistors that will be able to show off creations such as Emily by allowing a much greater number of computations per second. “If you’re trying to process the graphics in a photo-realistic animation, in real-time, there’s a lot of computation involved,” said Mr Koduri. He said that AMD’s new chip – the Radeon HD 4870 X2 – was able to process 2.4 teraflops of information per second, meaning it had a capability similar to a computer that – only 12 years ago – would have filled a room. AMD’s chip fits inside a standard PC. But he said that the line between what was real and what was rendered would not be blurred completely until 2020.