Just got back from Final Fantasy, an amazing cavalcade of sights and sounds with very little story or characters to intrude. I guess this is to be expected in such an ambitious first effort of this kind; new technologies in entertainment often overshadow the more human aspects. Still, it’s wonderful entertainment for the geek side of us all – “How did they get her hair to move like that?” and etc. Worth seeing, if only for it being the first step on a really interesting road.
What occurred to me is how the human voices (Ming-Na, Alec Baldwin, Donald Sutherland, and a funny Steve Buscemi, among others) took us so far into accepting these pixels as humans. Computers can do (relatively) convincing skin, eyes, and hair, but they’re nowhere near ready to simulate a human voice that would fool anybody. Imagine how the impact of HAL in 2001 would have been blunted without Douglas Rain’s soothing, creepy voice. And what if Spielberg’s “mechas” in A.I. had standard, “computer generated” voices? Maybe the human voice is the real final frontier in computer simulation.