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Upcoming vintage horror curio The Vanishing of Ethan Carter will use a revolutionary visual technique in which the artists take a boatload of photos then use the magic of technology to recreate digital 3D representations of said pics.It's called photogrammetry and it's mighty impressive looking. Using something called Lowe's Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) algorithm, the art team can transfer photos into game assets like magic. "Feed it with good photos taken around some object and you get the exact replica of that object, in 3D, in full color, with more detail than you could ever wish for," explained artist Andrzej Poznanski on developer The Astronaut's blog.
Poznanski suggested that this fancy new tech doesn't only look great, but it has a discernible subconscious effect on the player. For example, he noted that the following asset of a church in the game has a ton of environmental detail pertaining to its history. "If you really wanted it, you could probably make sense of it all," he said. "The floor might be more worn out around the front door, or where your chair wheels constantly scrub a patch of the floor, and the outer wall might be darker from the side that gets hit by the rain more often, etc."
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