Unity's tech demo 'Enemies' features a stunningly realistic digital human

Unity has showcased the incredible realism it's capable of in a new tech demo.

With the Game Developers Conference happening this week, the team behind the Unity engine have released a video demonstrating their efforts to create a realistic digital human.

The cinematic teaser, called "Enemies", opens with a lavishly detailed room and a woman sitting in front of a chessboard. The woman is rendered with a stunningly high level of detail. Her hair and skin look so lifelike you almost have to remind yourself that this is a digital construction and not an actual human being.

The video is short and sweet, with the mysterious woman mulling over the chessboard while the floor begins to descend. Unfazed by the movement of this mechanical elevator, she begins to play. The camera shows a close-up of her face, displaying an amazing level of detail on her skin, with wrinkles and skin pigments giving her an extremely lifelike look.

This builds on the Unity team's work on creating photorealistic human character models started in The Heretic. In a blog post, the Unity team acknowledged that "Creating and rendering a believable digital human character is one of the most difficult problems in computer graphics."

The team developed an all-new Unity Hair solution to create hair that looks natural and moves realistically.

The team will be releasing the Digital Human 2.0 package that contains all of the new enhancements within a couple of months. Still, it will likely be several years before we see character models like this implemented in games.

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It's already been a great year for games. Check out our pick of the best games of 2022 (so far).