The com­pany who pro­duce the ani­ma­tion for Grand Theft Auto, Image Met­rics, claim to have cre­ate photo-realistic ani­ma­tions that break through the ‘uncanny val­ley’ bar­rier. The Times is a believer, giv­ing us a sam­ple video and stat­ing that IM’s life­like ani­ma­tion her­alds a new era for com­puter games.

“Ninety per cent of the work is con­vinc­ing peo­ple that the eyes are real, […] the sub­tlety of the tim­ing of eye move­ments is a big one. Peo­ple also have a nat­ural asym­me­try — for instance, in the mus­cles in the side of their face. Those types of imper­fec­tions aren’t that sig­nif­i­cant but they are what makes peo­ple look real.”

Pre­vi­ous meth­ods for ani­mat­ing faces have involved putting dots on a face and observ­ing the way the dots move, but Image Met­rics analy­ses facial move­ments at the level of indi­vid­ual pix­els in a video, mean­ing that the sub­tlest vari­a­tions — such as the way the skin creases around the eyes, can be tracked.