John Gaeta, Academy Award winning visual effects guru, recently spoke to BoingBoing about his upcoming Ninja Assassin project.  Along they way, he offers some insight into “hybrid entertainment”, and how he believes video games and movies will soon merge into a new interactive media.

They will become “content simulation engines ” which is something that we re already beginning to see in limited “sand box” games like GRAND THEFT AUTO IV and FALLOUT 3. He suggests that average kids will be able to use these engines to generate reasonably good movies which again is already happening with original machinma films created almost entirely with digital assets found within games like WORLD OF WARCRAFT and HALO.

Something like this has been long predicted, ever since people first began making Machinima videos with the original Quake engine, and groups like Rooster Teeth have proven it viable with the success of their Red vs Blue series.  But doing so requires ongoing improvements in Realtime graphics rendering used in engines, and probably a collaboration with realtime graphics hardware companies to optimize performance.

So in the end, all us Vis Scientists and Gamers win either way 🙂

via ‘Matrix’ visual effects supervisor John Gaeta on ‘Ninja Assassin’ and the future of interactive digital media.