Going, going--where?

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An animated crystal ball
Now that animation has gone mainstream, what will its eventual fate be? Certainly, Hollywood has grown accustomed to its face. All of the contestants in the 1998 Academy Awards for special effects used "Elastic Reality" morphing software, for example. Certainly, the glitz will wear off as children, particularly, fail to be awed by the computer power that impresses the rest of us.

Jessica Hodgins of Georgia Tech says the successful animated features work because "Kids responded to them because the characters are appealing, not because of the technology used to create them. It will work when they can make characters appealing enough that kids will react emotionally to them."

In "Titanic," for example, Elastic Reality handled all the time morphs; in one scene, the female lead's dewy 1912 eye gently time-travels 85 years to its 1997 incarnation. This effect was achieved through the subtle digital manipulation of lighting, eye shape and tissue texture. (Images courtesy of VFX HQ)

Computer animation has already gained a foot outside entertainment, says Perry Kivolowitz, co-inventor of Elastic Reality and adjunct instructor in computer science at University of Wisconsin-Madison. One fertile field, he thinks, is to replace teleconferencing, which is limited by bandwidth problems. At some point, he says, it may be feasible to transmit a computer-generated hologram rather than an actual video image.

Scientific visualization is another fertile field for animation techniques, he adds. "To be able to walk inside a complex molecule to visualize the shapes inside will help you target specific receptors. That's possible now to some extent, but it's getting better."

Eventually, as with most up-and-coming technologies, computer animation may be yesterday's ho-hum that will be replaced by something even more powerful. To Michael Gleicher, who works on motion capture, the sooner the hubbub over computer animation passes, the better. "You don't go to an art museum and say 'Look what a paint brush can do. You don't go to a movie and say, 'Look what a camera can do.'"

Computer animation, he argues, is a misleading moniker in the first place. "Computers are cheap. What is critical is the talent of the animators. It's a lot of work..."

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