Photogrammetry-The Age of New Gaming

The era of new gaming, using a technique called photogrammetry is going to hit the market pretty soon. Photogrammetry is to produce digital replicas of the real world. This technique can be used to recreate rooms, objects, streets and even whole cities. Earlier this technology was used in creating effects for the film industry. Now for the first time this photogrammetry technology is being implemented in video games. Playing in an environment one recognizes gives an added thrill. The ideal world for a player is one that faithfully recreates our world but lets him do things you cannot do in reality. That may be racing supercars through your home neighborhood or surviving the apocalypse or even be a hero and save the whole city. Photogrammetry works by gathering hundreds of photographs of an object or scene taken from multiple angles and combining them into a 3D model. Common points between photos are joined up to create a basic shell and this virtual object is then skinned with the overlapping images. You not only end up with the exact shape of the object but the exact look of the object as it appears in the photos. The results are so accurate that photogrammetry has been used to improve aerial mapping and forensic analysis of crime scenes. Its impact could be felt most strongly in gaming. In fact, the combination of photorealism and virtual reality could make games all too real. Violence, for example, might become a bigger problem when our actions feel realistic and look increasingly gruesome. A games studio in Poland, The Astronauts, is using this approach in its latest game, “The Vanishing of Ethan Carter”. Canadian studio Pixyul wants to take the technique to its limit – scanning the whole world using drones and reconstructing it inside a game. As a start Pixyul is planning on making an exact reconstruction of downtown Montreal and will be releasing a game made by using photogrammetry next year. The studio plans to release new areas one by one, starting with North America. Hence photogrammetry can change the world of gaming and the view of gamers of the entire world.