Any sufficiently advanced technology, Arthur C. Clarke argued, is indistinguishable from magic.

There could be a corollary to Clarke's law, though, when it comes to one particular kind of technology: animation. Because when that technology becomes sufficiently advanced, apparently, it becomes indistinguishable from THE DEMONS THAT HAUNT YOUR NIGHTMARES.

My evidence is the video above -- a proof-of-concept animation from the gaming company Activision. The firm, publisher of titles like Call of Duty, introduced its "next-generation character rendering" at the Game Developers Conference yesterday. And the rendering is, indeed, as next-gen as it is totally horrifying. The real-time animation tech Activision is developing here builds on high-resolution images of human faces (acquired, in this case, from USC's Institute for Creative Technologies and its appropriately freaky/awesome Light Stage Facial Scanning and Performance Capture). Activision's R&D team has converted data provided by the actual human faces into a "70 bones rig" -- a digital "skeleton," essentially, that mimics a human one in terms of its complexity. And that intricate framework has allowed the team to preserve the subtle visual details of the human face -- most remarkably, the fellow's eyes -- in composite maps. It makes for animation that seems remarkably ... animated, as in possessing anima.