When will there be no spoon? When will the gaming experience lead us to believe we're in the "real world", when we're really just in a Matrix? While photo-realism is what some consider the Holy Grail of interactive entertainment, a similar endeavor is already beginning to culminate: the seamless blending of real-world physics into the gaming arena. What started out as Pong (reverse velocity of a ball at a boundary, ad infinitum) became Mario Tennis (add horizontal motion), and then Virtua Tennis (make sure the player's hair is swooshing).

"First person shooter" (FPS) has always been the envelope-pushing genre (Duke Nukem, Doom, Quake). The shooters were the games that told us our video cards were outdated, our CPU was too slow, and our memory was not enough. This still holds true as today's most intensive games are attempting to achieve reality though perfect physics. Take Half-Life 2, whose Havoc physics engine has allowed millions of players worldwide to pick up a dead enemy's leg, swing him around, and throw his realistically-reacting body into walls.

Even newer is the Unreal Engine 3, which boasts complex vehicles and dismemberable ragdoll animations. Every object in UE3 has physical properties, such as friction coefficients, and physics-driven sound. Coming up on the horizon is a remarkable accomplishment called Offset. The Offset engine provides motion blur for 100% of objects (including particles), specular bloom (shininess), complex- and self-shadowing (again, even particles!), and a full 64-bit floating point HDR rendering pipeline (looking into the sun never felt so good). We're almost there; keep on the look-out for Neo.