As the paper explains, “Recent deep image-to-image translation techniques allow fast generation of face images from freehand sketches. However, existing solutions tend to overfit to sketches, thus requiring professional sketches or even edge maps as input. To address this issue, our key idea is to implicitly model the shape space of plausible face images and synthesize a face image in this space to approximate an input sketch. Our method essentially uses input sketches as soft constraints and is thus able to produce high-quality face images even from rough and/or incomplete sketches.” 

It’s not clear how the software will handle race. Of the 17,000 sketches and their corresponding photos created so far, the majority have been Caucasian and South American faces. This could be a result of the source data (bias is an ongoing problem in the world of AI), or down to the complexity of face shapes — the researchers don’t provide any further details.

In any case, the technology is due to go on show at this year’s (virtual) SIGGRAPH conference in July. According to the project’s website, code for the software is “coming soon,” which suggests we could see its application in the wild in the coming months — not only as a fun app to play around with, but also potentially in law enforcement, helping to rapidly generate images of suspects.

Microsoft developer Mojang and NVIDIA added a type of ray tracing called “path tracing” to the Windows 10 version of the game. That realistically simulates a variety of lighting conditions, including direct light sources like the sun or glowing lava, hard and soft shadows, diffuse global illumination, reflections, refraction and atmospheric scattering.

The final result is more dramatic than with other ray-traced games (see the frame above and more screenshots here) probably because Minecraft is so inherently unrealistic to begin with. In order to run the new update in real time, however, you’ll need to have a Windows 10 PC equipped with one of NVIDIA’s RTX GPUs. Since Mojang recently canceled its Super Duper Graphics Pack for Minecraft on the Xbox One X, that appears to be the only way you’re going to get better graphics on the game for now.

It needs to be said that this isn’t exactly an original idea from NVIDIA and Microsoft. Earlier this year, Digital Foundry showed off a mod called “Sonic Ether’s Unbelievable Shaders” from Minecraft creator Sonic Ether. His shader is also a path tracer, and delivers many of the same features as the new official update.

On top of the Minecraft update, NVIDIA also announced ray-tracing for new games including RPG Dying Light 2, Metro Exodus – The Two Colonels DLC and SYNCED: Off Planet. It’s also bringing the feature to existing games Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Control, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, Watch Dogs: Legion and Wolfenstein: Youngblood. It appears to improve those games to varying degrees, but not nearly as much as Minecraft, judging by screenshots available in its news release.