Large Image Display:Animatrix: Final Flight of the Osiris: Initial Fight

This frame is from the widescreen version of ?Final Flight of the Osiris?, one of the Animatrix animated shorts. It has been considerably scaled back from the original material. However, you can clearly see the detail and realistic motion the CG figures possess. This is easily equal to any passive CG sequence created today. Yet, it was actually created back in 2003.

If the lavish attention to detail on movement and poise seems a little like the ragdoll physics used in videogames, that is because it is exactly that. Final Flight of the Osiris was created by Square, the company responsible for the ?Final Fantasy? games, as opposed to the normal companies involved with passive CG, such as Disney or Pixar, who don?t really have the expertise with real-time CG and interaction to be able to translate from one field to the other.

The frame is preserved here as a reminder to all, what is possible if you take technologies designed for interactive VR, and roll them out to passive VR. The entire 10-minute animation feels the same way, polished to a high quality, and developed not by the techniques mainstream CG animation uses, but by the techniques interactive VR uses.

It is testament to the fact that the two systems, interactive and passive, do not need to be so different, after all.

Link: Final Flight of the Osiris