This year's Game Developers Conference will offer attendees a peek at Activision Blizzard's research and development efforts in creating photorealistic characters for next-generation games and hardware.

Researcher Jorge Jimenez will present high-quality next-generation shading techniques running on a "plausible game rig" to show Activision Blizzard's "first step toward achieving truly believable characters." Jimenez's talk, "Photorealistic Eyes Rendering and Deformation," will touch on subsurface scattering rendering, eye shading, anti-aliasing, depth of field and film grain — real-time rendering techniques aimed at overcoming the uncanny valley.

Jimenez is a real-time graphics researcher who joined Activision Blizzard in 2012. He blogs about real-time graphics R&D at his website, which touches on some of the techniques he'll present at GDC 2013.

GDC 2013 will take place in San Francisco from March 25 to 29.