Animation!

I just attended a lecture by Karan Singh, Prof in U of Toronto. He works on Computer animation. He was the research director of the Oscar winning animation film "Ryan". It's about this ground breaking Candian Animator Ryan Larkin, who fell thru the cracks of society and now pan handles in Montreal. Its a poignant film, do watch it here.
The technology went into this Film is amazing. I saw lot of similarities on what we do in Geophysics and Computer Graphics, the math is the same , the same Matrix inversions, coordinate transformations. The camera angles are a very interesting aspect in graphics, it would be amazing if seismic data can be visualized at different camera angles highlighting different aspects of the data. Amazing possibilities.

A picture showing these 'cords' wrapping around the body

They use this new graphics structure called 'cords' which are sort of ropes which symbolizes the tieing down of the spirit. This is a very simple algo implemented very cleverly, this movie I guess spawned few masters thesis and a PhD thesis even.
I was amazed at the rate at which modeling technology is growing, I asked him a question when will the animation industry pass the "Turing test"? i.e when will the audience wouldn't be able to distinguish whether the scene was live shot or a computer animated shot? His answer is we are almost there, the long shots like battle shots are almost computer animated, but close shots, he says may be atleast a decade away. I cant wait till the all celebrities are gone, and only celebrities left will be the nerds who create them.
This made me wonder, when everything can be modeled in a computer, is there a necessity for the real thing? The question Neo had to answer in Matrix......