Is it possible for a human driver to beat a car loaded with lightning-fast autonomous artificial intelligence" That’s the million-dollar question in Chevrolet‘s new video, “The Human Race,” created in collaboration with Epic Games and visual-effects studio The Mill. The 90-second clip shows the wild FNR autonomous concept pitted against a 2017 Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 piloted by an accomplished driver. It made its debut this week, not at some media drive event or at an auto show, but at the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco as proof of concept of a new real-time virtual car-filming technology. The only physical vehicle in this race was the very cool Mill Blackbird CGI-assist rig.
Until now, CGI work for movies has occurred in post-production, once all the physical footage has already beencaptured. But Epic Games’ virtual-reality Unreal Engine, a positional service called array tracking, and The Mill’s Mill Cyclops virtual-production tech combine to allow filmmakers to see how virtual cars look in the shot in real time. This advance could allow filmmakers to capture the necessary shots in as few takes as possible using a CGI “skin” rather than try to work with what they shot after the fact?or, worse, scheduling expensive and resource-intensive reshoots.
Chevrolet expressed hope that the technology could eventually be used in interactions with customers, too. ?The technology involved in producing this ...