Future of graphics, or load of hype? See this interview with AMD and form your own opinion on Cinema 2.0.
For years, there has been a massive chasm between the worlds of movies and games, and those who attempted to cross it have usually fallen short and plummeted into the inky blackness below.
That gap is getting smaller and soon the line between interactive movie and immersive game are going to become increasingly blurred, according to AMD's director of digital media, Charlie Boswell.
Boswell recently had a few minutes to sit down with us to discuss Cinema 2.0, which he describes as, "a vision and a roadmap that is going to usher in a new expectation that users are going to have about the technology experience. "
Bold words indeed, but Boswell was able to back them up with a lot of information about the idea, calling it an "amazing immersive experience on an AMD based platform."
"I can make this statement because of AMD's involvement in both the entertainment industry and the gaming industry," he added, explaining how the company had spent the last eight years working very closely with some of the most famous Hollywood directors including the likes of George Lucas and Robert Rodriguez.
He went to explain that now AMD is seeking to take the, "cinematic quality of what those folks are doing while working with the interactive folks in the industry to really help move those two vectors together."
Boswell explained that these days the cinematic guys crave more interactivity, while gamers want more cinematic immersion. "Cinema 2.0 is a technology base that allows those two technology vectors to come together," he said.
He pointed to the success a basic amount of interactivity brought to DVDs, with the inclusion of things like menus, bonus features and director's commentary.
According to Boswell, AMDs technology is now at a stage where high fidelity objects can be rendered in real time at 30 frames per second on normal PC hardware. In the very near future, green screen directors will be able to directly transport all the digital assets created for the movie directly into the game with no changes or stylisation.
Given that the creation of these models is often extremely expensive, this has both economic and aesthetic benefits and fundamentally changes the way a director shoots a movie.
When we asked Boswell why ports between the movie and gaming world, in both directions, are often so poor, he explained: "Often the director has a vision for the movie and that movie is successful, but when someone makes a game about the movie it's usually a representation of what they think the director wanted, or a completely different interpretation of the movie."
He went on to explain that this is precisely what AMD is trying to change with this new technology saying :"Cinema 2.0 means that the game can now be considered an interactive version of the movie and not just a stylised version of it. High fidelity characters, sets, environments, camera angles that brought your mind into the movie are now directly translated into the game."
Again pretty big words, and there are some videos out there which showcase the kind of thing that Boswell is talking about, but surely this is still years away from the grubby paws of the average person.
According to Boswell, no it isn't. "That's the best news of this conversation," he told us.
"This is technology you can buy today. Cinema 2.0 is capable on AMD's 4800 family of graphics cards and existing AMD CPUs," he said, adding that content is being created now by movie makers, so we should start seeing it trickle down into the market over the coming months.
For the near future, content is going to be limited and the necessary hardware to enjoy this properly is going to be on the pricey side, but over time both of these factors should become increasingly negligible. For the sake of never having to play another crappy 'video game of the movie' again, we can only pray this comes sooner rather than later.