Intel Involved in Making Better 3D Movies

The Intel Corporation is tapping a new business opportunity in South Korea and it is not anything to do with supplying more mobile chips to Samsung Electronics Co. It is actually helping to make better three-dimensional movies.

The Korean animation film market lacks the technological finesse of their Western counterparts, this explains why science fiction movies are not popular locally or form a part of the big, global Korean hits.  But the global chip maker is testing the market, by providing its high-end processor chips and cloud computing technology to Dexter Studios to make Mr. Go, a new Korean movie that features a 3-D gorilla character named Ling Ling.

While computer graphics are used in a variety of areas, the data storage capacity needed to make detailed computer graphics like those used in natural disaster movies or Sci-Fi movies are enormous, experts say.
“For the depiction of a realistic move of a big wave, each and every drop of water is drawn through detailed and complicated calculations of an equation,” H.S. Lee, president of Intel Korea said during a news conference in Seoul recently. “The same goes for the movement of an animal’s fur.”  Dexter Digital, the film studio’s CG unit, says Mr. Go’s Ling Ling comes with 2 million to 3 million strands of fur.  “Without the right hardware performance, it would have been impossible to make the movie,” said Lee Yoon-suk, the planning and marketing director at Dexter Studios.  The company used supercomputers that ran on Intel’s Xeon E5 processors to make the film.  The audience will get to decide for themselves now the movie has been released, if they find the baseball-playing, computer-generated gorilla endearing enough to make it a summer hit movie.  The movie will be available in other Asian countries later this month.  Intel Korea’s Mr. Lee said the company plans to continue cooperating with Dexter Studios, noting that the CG business will develop into a key industry for South Korea in the future.

[Image via picstopin]

SOURCE: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/07/16/intel-taps-new-opportunity-3-d-movies/?mod=WSJBlog&mod=