Disney Research develops unsettlingly realistic 3D-rendered eyes

We’re keen on checking in with the folks at Disney Research from time to time to see what crazy projects its been working on. At SIGGRAPH Asia this week, the outfit is presenting recent work in crafting more detailed 3D-rendered eyes. In order to properly capture all the details needed to make things appear realistic for things like character generation, the studio has crafted a method for nabbing those intricacies based not only on appearance, but taking into account how the eye responds to light, too.

Game graphics continue to improve steadily over time, but one place where they continue to fall short of reality is the eyes. The windows to the soul, as they say, are just never very believable with game characters. A new method for high-quality capture of eyes from Disney’s research initiative and the Institute of Technology Zürich could fix that. “The human eye is one of the central features of individual appearance,” the researchers explain in the video above. “However, so far it’s appearance has only been approximated in computer graphics.” The new method proposes a novel way to capture all the visible parts of the eye, similarly to how games capture faces for game models today. This new method is so accurate the iris of a digital character can automatically expand and contract depending on the lighting conditions in an environment, just like a real eye. The researchers say this will be especially useful in creating digital doubles of actors, as Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare recently did with Kevin Spacey, for example.