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1st International Symposium on Interactive Cinema (ICS 2006)

Motivation

For some time now veterans from the film industry have heard claims from hardware vendors that feature length animated movies will be renderable in real-time, thus enabling interactivity within a cinematic quality experience. Unfortunately these claims today have not quite lived up to their expectations. In 2006, Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony will release their next generation game consoles. Although these new systems will further blur the distinction between animated movies and computer games, their hardware technology was not explicitly designed to enable cinematic quality experiences.

Today, a movie is an authored experience presented to an audience through the medium of film or digital film in the very near future. The director has a vision of the movie based on a screenplay, and has total control over how a viewer experiences the movie. Alternatively, a computer game is an interactive experience between a player, a computing device and perhaps other players. Unfortunately, there is quite a bit of ambiguity as to what an interactive cinematic experience actually is and who will want to interact with it. Further ambiguities such as where will this new form of entertainment be experienced (at a home or in a new yet to be invented ÒinteractiveÓ theatre), has further discouraged producers from making large scale investments in this new and unproven genre.

Additionally, it is well known that the games market has recently surpassed the size of the movie market, and continues to grow. Major motion picture studios, sensing a decline in box-office sales, are already searching for new ways to bring the audience back into the theatres. If we look at the progression of motion pictures, we see numerous attempts at increasing box-office sales via numerous technical advances such as: talking pictures, color, surround sound, 3D, CG special effects, feature length computer animated movies etc. Therefore it is plausible that the incorporation of interactivity and viewer participation in a shared interactive cinematic experience has the potential to become the next logical advancement in how movies are experienced.

Consequently, history has shown that innovations in special purpose hardware eventually become generalized and incorporated into general-purpose processor architectures. Today it is readily obvious that multi-core, multi-processor architectures will be at the heart of all the major next generation computing systems. Current industry processor trends indicate an increasing emphasis on parallelism, in multiple forms including: instruction-level, statement-level, thread-level, and stream-level parallelism. In addition, as the demand for real-time photo-realism increases in the games industry, another trend is moving towards the reliance on global illumination techniques in real-time. These global illumination techniques inherently lend themselves to highly parallel architectures. Although the supercomputing industry has extensively researched parallel algorithms, the emphasis predominantly has been on parallelizing a single simulation on a cluster of workstations. There is little work available on parallelizing games, which incorporate multiple interacting physical simulations as well as tasks such as user input, music, and rendering.