Epic Games has been obsessed with real-time motion capture for years, but the company is now trying to take its experiments with the technology one step further. Enter "Siren," a digital personality that it created alongside a few prominent firms in the gaming industry: Vicon, Cubic Motion, 3Lateral and Tencent (which just became a major investor in Ubisoft). The crazy thing about Siren is that she comes to life using live mocap tech, powered by software from Vicon, that can make her body and finger movements be captured and live-streamed into an Unreal Engine project. Back in 2016, Epic Games teased the live motion-capture technology first used for Hellblade, which was stunning and showed the potential of the tech. With this new iteration, though, the company says it hopes to take "live-captured digital humans to the next level."

At GDC 2018, they're debuting in games like Tekken 7, Star Wars Battlefront II, and Call of Duty to help you spread your most glorious gaming moments to the world. Highlights was formerly called ShadowPlay Highlights, but it seems Nvidia changed the name to coincide with these announcements. It automatically identifies your gaming highlights--such as kills, multi-hit combos, or oh-so-delicious chicken dinners--and lets you easily create short video clips that can be shared on social networks. PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, LawBreakers, Metal Gear Survive, and Fortnite Battle Royale previously supported Highlights, and it's coming to even more games soon: the aforementioned Tekken 7, Call of Duty: WWII, and Star Wars Battlefront II, as well as Escape from Tarkov and Dying Light: Bad Blood. Better yet, you can share your clips as GIFs now!

Microsoft wants your PC's hardware to get smart--and your gaming foes to become even more devious. Earlier this month, the company revealed Windows ML, an API that taps into your computer's CPU and GPU to bolster your software with machine learning capabilities. At GDC 2018 on Monday, Microsoft explained how Windows ML can benefit video games, and introduced new "DirectML" tools that provide GPU hardware acceleration for games that use WinML, built on the same no-hassle-for-gamers principles as the DirectX standard. What does it all mean? Machine learning can make games prettier, more adaptable to individual playstyles, and easier to create, Microsoft says.

The Game Developers Conference (GDC) takes place in San Francisco next month and this year's event includes the GDC's first ever film festival. For three days starting March 19th, the GDC will host a selection of documentary and narrative films focused on the art and culture of video games, and Q&As with the filmmakers will follow most of the screenings. Each day of the festival with be themed. The first day, focused on international works, will feature screenings of Branching Paths, Moleman 4 -- Longplay and the premiere of Heting Chen's Indie Games in China. The second puts the spotlight on webseries with the premiere of the feature-length version of The CheckPoint Series and two work-in-progress screenings of Noclip: Horizon: Zero Dawn and Area 5's Outerlands.

Each Summit offers a comprehensive overview of a specific game industry discipline, and the AI Summit is no exception. This year, for example, Guerrilla Games' Julian Berteling will be delivering a very cool talk on "Beyond'Killzone': Creating New AI Systems for'Horizon Zero Dawn'" to explain the changes that Guerilla made to switch from having to support a single human enemy in closed corridor spaces to a game with more than 25 wildly different characters in a large open world. You'll want to see this, because attendees will learn ways of dealing with an expanding scope of AI, either throughout a single title's production or when moving to a new title. Additionally, attendees will understand concrete methods for dealing with navigation, movement, and animation for open world titles with many, widely varied agents. And in her Summit session on "'Race for the Galaxy': A Neural Network in Production" Temple Gate chief Theresa Duringer will explain how the studio's game Race for the Galaxy (a digital adaptation of the board game) uses temporal difference learning to power its AI.