Staying Current with Graphics Research

One of our favorite things to do is to find cool graphics research videos and to share them with each other on AIM. We're trying to stay current with the latest graphics techniques in hopes that we may find useful technologies for Overgrowth and for our future games. Here are five of the coolest research videos we have been enjoying:

Generating 3D Faces from a Single Image

3D faces research page

Seam Carving for Content Aware Images

Seam carving research page

3D Texture Capture with a Consumer Camera

3D texture capture research page

3D Virtual Reality from 2D Images

3D virtual realities research page

Cutting-Edge Fluid Dynamics

Fluid dynamics research page

One thing we've noticed is that academic research is often far ahead of mainstream game tech. Perhaps this is because it's hard for big companies to overcome their inertia and update their development pipeline. As a small indie company, we're hoping to stay agile and to embrace as many cutting-edge ideas as we can. In fact, we've been in contact with a number of researchers and even managed to arrange a lunch with Gregory Ward, one of the authors of the third video above! In a future blog post we will explain how this technology might help us with Overgrowth.

Have you guys come across any awesome graphics research videos that seem years ahead of their time? Please share in the comments!