Computer and console hardware has advanced to a point where it is possible to render quite realistically looking scenes in realtime, not yet the quality of Final Fantasy, but its getting pretty damn close. This made me thinking, what beside games will it offer us? There are already machinema aprearing every onces in a while, movies rendered with ingame engines. However those are still classic movies for most part. I think sooner or later we will see a new type of movie, neither a real movie nor a classic game.
A classic movie is always linear, it has a start and an end. Some movies go a little further and wrange the timeline a bit so that the end might apear at the start of the movie or the like, but its still something you watch once and have seen it all. With realtime rendered movies this could be taken a step further. Instead of providing a fixed linear film to watch a realtime rendered movie could provide a complete world to explore by the viewer. The viewer itself wouldn't interact with the happenings like in a game, but we would be offered similar freedoms, the freedom to move around, to look at other stuff in a scene, to observe happenings beside what is happening to the main characters. This would allow to dive into the movie much deeper and the movie would be allow to present a far richer setting as it does today. Instead of just a few characters with a few lines, it could provide dozens of characters with tons of text, the viewer wouldn't get everything on the first viewing, but could focus on different parts of the happenings on each viewings, if there is talking in the background, he could move ofter to that and listen. If there is a fight happening he could view it from the perspective of the other oponent or from the perspective of a by stander. The viewer had the ability to view a movie from multiple viewpoints, not only predefined ones, but also ones that he chose for himself.
The effort that would be required for such a movie would be quite huge, since not only a few maincharecters would need to be fitted with dialog, but everybody appearing in a movie would get text and something todo. It would turn a simple movie into a complete little world. The idea sounds interesting, not sure if something like that is already available or ever will, but it just sounds to cool to not try it one day.