Whilst the Unreal Engine 4 was not shown to the public at GDC, Quantic Dream, creators of Heavy Rain and Fahrenheit, offered up a seven minute demonstration of its latest engine, 'Kara', rendered in real-time on a PlayStation 3.
The demonstration focused on the firm's new 'performance-capture' technology, which, unlike many traditional approaches allows Quantic to record both face and body movements alongside an actor's voice, providing natural and consistent character performances. In the above demonstration, the actress, Valorie Curry, had to wear 90 sensors on her face, as opposed to the techniques in the film, Avatar, which Quantic was attempting to mimic, which required actors to wear head-mounted cameras.
Whilst a marked improvement over the Heavy Rain game and most certainly an impressive feat, this writer still believes actual facial expression feels less emotive than in Quantic's earlier tech demo 'The Casting' and hopes that either with time or new hardware, the firm can recreate some of fluidity of expression we saw back in 2006, tightened up and ready for an interactive game.
We're sorry to say for those that have become attached to the latest tech demo 'Kara', neither the character nor the setting will be featured in Quantic's latest works.
