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Technology

'Bullet-time' effect seen in real-time games

20 July 2005

In a strange example of the cyber world imitating Hollywood imitating the cyber world, researchers have achieved the “bullet-time” effect of the movie The Matrix in real-time multiplayer games.

The effect combines slow motion with dynamic camera movement to seemingly allow a character’s environment to be slowed down, giving the player more time to respond to events, says Jouni Smed at the University of Turku in Finland, who led the work.

Smed is exploiting software called a local perception filter, which can make imperceptible changes to where objects appear in the game. Smed and colleagues used these filters to introduce…

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