Saturday I spent some time looking at the re-creation of the Sistine Chapel on the Vassar Campus in Second Life. Sunday I took my kids to see Ratatouille. I thought the Sistine Chapel simulation was pretty impressive; my wife, who doesn't make allowances for the limitations of the computer, thought it was a travesty. There is a school of thought that holds that art shouldn't be reproduced, because the I thought the Sistine Chapel simulation was pretty impressive; my wife, who doesn’t make allowances for the limitations of the computer, thought it was a travesty. There is a school of thought that holds that art shouldn’t be reproduced, because the reproduction can’t ever do justice to the original. The late Dr. Albert C. Barnes felt that way, and wouldn’t allow color reproductions of his collection of paintings to be printed; the Barnes Foundation did publish books, but printed the illustrations in black and white so that no one would imagine that they were seeing the correct colors.Seeing Ratatouille, which I liked a lot, and comparing its graphics to those in Second Life, brought to mind the attempted mugging scene from Crocodile Dundee: “That’s not a knife. This is a knife!” Now, considering that Second Life tries to be an interactive client-server system that responds in something more or less approximating real time when all conditions are perfect and renders to an ordinary computer screen, and Ratatouille was rendered frame by frame by a server farm at Pixar to extremely high-resolution image files, this isn’t a fair comparison in terms of computing power or display resolution. According to Pixar’s site, rendering a movie frame takes about six hours, although some frames have taken ninety hours.But the fact is, our eyes don’t care how hard it was to produce an image, and don’t care about the limitation of hardware. Ratatouille looks, sounds, and feels real enough to suspend disbelief in a basically absurd story; Second Life comes up short of suspending disbelief even when incredible care and effort has been expended to make a simulation as realistic as possible.What’s your take on this? Software Development