There have been many articles on Gamasutra exploring human emotions and so on. The industry seems to share Bill's opinion that the future is synthetics and better simulations.

The thing that gets me is that people used to think the same thing about voice acting in games. There were so many efforts to synthesize speech and use that, since theoretically it would save tons of storage space. Once CD-ROM and DVD-ROM was widely available (as well as bigger hard drives and sound compression), many games began featuring full voice acting and little to no text. Synthesized speech in modern games is unheard of as far as I know.

My theory is that one day people will look back on these days of simulations and 3D animation the way we look back at speech synthesis today. Definitely worthwhile and interesting, but just not a viable substitute for real voice acting.

You really notice something like this when you're playing Oblivion. Everything looks so realistic until you start dealing with people. They move unrealistically and the facial close-ups look downright cheesy. And this is an AAA title where all the stops were pulled. I think it'd be so much better if they had just gone with FMV as in some of the late 90s RPGs.