CLOSING

At the time of this writing, 2017, CG is nearing the end of another decade. It slips passed us, mostly unnoticed because so much of it already feels authentic, only bad CG distracts us from its message. Since its inception, CG has changed drastically as it has been steadily advancing toward believable realism and complexity. At its beginnings, it developed thanks to the work of a few visionaries, such as Ivan Sutherland, Ed Catmull, and James Blinn, into the booming industry that it is today. Originally design and engineering oriented, entertainment through cinema is what has caused the most rapid advances in CG, but soon video games may be the driving force behind a new, interactive kind of realistic CG, virtual reality.

Manovich mentions that the capacity to produce realism with CG has developed in bits and pieces (196); this is because the CG has mostly advanced by solving problems for specific scenarios, or under certain conditions. Sometimes CG just needs to wait for hardware technology to catch up. As computers have become more powerful, the ability to simulate complexity has made CG capable of photo-realistically rendering most things. Manovich considers rendering the human form as the "yardstick" by which computer graphics can be measured (196), but one thing that remains elusive is the ability to replicate convincing human faces, proving Mori's theory of the Uncanny Valley to be a significant hurdle not just in robotics but for CG as well. Seeing how far CG has come, however, it is likely just a matter of time.