I just hope to see this soon on a PC first, a movie made using this will be great. Wonder how much would it cost just use one...

Wow.......

I'm sure there will be plenty of ways to get around using actual actors, though this technique is certainly easiest that way...looks nice.

Imgine the FPSes they can make with this software. UT2020!!!

I hope the DNF team don't get word of this.

Make a movie using it? what's the point of capturing an actor, storing all the data, rendering the scene, just to play it back in a movie? Why not just film the actor and leave it at that?

So when consoles reach this stage.. ps5 xbox4 wii3 or whenever... we won't have to buy another console ever again??

At work, no audio. That's really something.

Though this has the same problem if not worse problem that current gen games have. These ruby demos look awesome, but how much money and time went into them. At this time and even in the future are such games viable in cost. The quick answer is no. As the industry is now it's not. This may change though. With such a move towards this level the gaming industry may have to settle with a universal rendering engine and design or some form of middle ware to bring this kind of design cost down.

The HD4870 is an impressive peice of technology, but by the time the next generation begins it will be a low end graphics card. The next generation consoles will (likely) be released in 2011/2012 and their GPUs will be somewhat similar to a mid to high level Graphics Card from 2010; which means that what is possible in a real time demo on the HD4870 should be fairly easy to obtain in game on next generation consoles.

The Lightstage demo is cool, and I don't see much (immediate) use in console games but I see huge value for game development. I don't expect that it will be used to create character models from people, but with how expensive it is to model anything in game I could see many companies using it to create their environment objects that can be used in game; take something (fairly) static and highly detailed like an antique chair and you're looking at several days worth of work of several developers at a total cost (to the company) of a couple thousand dollars. With a technology like this your company (or a company which markets its model library) can take a peice of furniture and "scan it" and get the model and normals (which could be done other ways before), but it can also get a full texture including material and shader effects. Even if EA was buying some expensive furniture to use in a system like ths, and then burning it to light their expensive cigars, it would be cheaper than modeling and texturing the objects.