AI trick could make people’s hair in video games look more realistic

People’s hair in animated movies and video games could start to look far more realistic, thanks to artificial intelligence.

For decades, hair in video games and animated movies has looked unnatural because of the complexity of modelling its movement. “Almost all works that exist today consider hair as a mesh,” says Vanessa Sklyarova at the Samsung AI Centre in Moscow, Russia. The graphical texture is then laid on top of this mesh, she says.

Sklyarova and her colleagues have come up with a way to make hair look natural by using a type of artificial intelligence called a neural …