That’s not data models, it’s women who model clothing. 🙂
There was a near-future SF novel I read many years ago (I don’t recall which one) that posited that actors would be replaced almost entirely by computer-generated models. We’re already seeing the precursors of it — all the Pixar releases, for instance. And characters in games are constantly getting more realistic; in portions of Final Fantasy X, for instance, you would swear that you’re looking at people, rather than computer-generated images.
Get some strong AI, and give them a couple decades of practice, and you may well start to see the occasional real movies — not just cartoon-like ones — made entirely in a computer.
As for the occasional ‘real’ movie, it’s already happening. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within came out over 10 years ago, and was the first mainstream non-cartoon computer animated film. Beowulf came out in 2007 with noticeable improvements. We’re not out of the uncanny valley yet, but fully animated characters such as LOTR’s Gollum, the robot in I, Robot, Dobby from the Harry Potter series, and numerous characters from Avatar and Rise of the Planet of the Apes make it seem like fully animated ‘real’ movies as a regular release is just around the corner.
I don’t know about Beowulf (didn’t see it), but other than the Final Fantasy movie, none of those computer-generated characters were supposed to be human. That’s the hard part: convincing humans that a moving and speaking computer-generated image is actually another human. Final Fantasy didn’t quite pull it off, though some of the characters were pretty good. (I haven’t seen it in a while, but if I recall correctly, the Dr. Cid character is one of the best human-impersonations I’ve ever seen.) I imagine the state of the art has improved since then, based on the games.
It most certainly has improved. What’s most impressive about many games today is the fact that often the cut scenes are rendered in real time, instead of being pre-rendered like a movie is. If game processors can do such impressive work on the fly, imagine what dedicated super machines should be able to do over an extended period of time!
Yes, I’ve been impressed by that too. It’ll be interesting to see what happens next.