Realism, what looks real?

What is real and what is realism? Realism resembles to what is real, or something that looks close to real. For years the gaming industry had tried create games that has better graphics and offer amazing visual experience, a more detail and real looking character would require a good graphic processing unit in a computer.

Developers is trying to make the users top experience the phenomena of immediacy, to let the players to forget they are actually playing a game. Through the advancement in technology, there were a lot of products created specially for games such as surround sound headsets, and multiple display monitors, so that players would merge themselves into the video game. These players will start to forget the presence of the monitors and the sound surrounding him, due to the in game sound produced in the headphones closely resembles the sound in real world.


Masahiro Mori coined the concept of Uncanny Valley, whereby something that has a close resemblance to a human figure, would make a person feels weird because of the appearance. The almost real looking figure would make the human mind doubt whether is it real or fake.

But the concept can also be applied to non human characters. In cartoons or animations, the characters are drawn and created with exaggerated proportions so that the viewer would not confused whether the characters are real or not. It lets the viewer know that 'you are watching a animation'.

However in films, the same species are created to look photo realistic for the human eye, such approach would make the viewer feel uneasy by looking at the character (the dog) because a dog in the real world would not be able to speak or even do certain stunts.