Deus Ex: Human Revolution's future tech inspiration, plus a Sarif Industries for the real world

Our action RPG sister site raidingparty.net has just posted this interview with Deus Ex: Human Revolution Art Director Jonathan Jacques-Belletête. Along with describing how he went about creating the visual flavour of the game and explaining some of the artistic subtexts, Jacques-Belletête discusses how the team were inspired by in-development technology from the real world to create some of Human Revolution's augmentations.

By sheer coincidence, last night's Newsight on BBC2 ran a feature on the latest generation of bionic hands. It could almost have been a precursor to Human Revolution's brilliant fake testimonial TV adverts for augmentations.

You're probably aware that Deus Ex: Human Revolution's near-future story centres around the resistance against human augmentations. Like Blade Runner, there's an underlying 'what it means to be human' thread to the plot and in the game mass protests erupt at the development of augmentations by Sarif Industries.

The Newsnight feature firstly tells of Viennese surgeon Professor Oskar Aszmann amputating the hand of a man who lost all its functionality in a motorbike accident. The patient voluntarily agreed to the amputation and will have the prosthetic hand fitted in a few weeks. Back in the studio, host Jeremy Paxman talks to a chap with an existing bionic hand, getting him to demonstrate its functionality and asking him, somewhat incredulously, how it all works.

The ethical debate was touched upon but only briefly, so you'll have to play Human Revolution to find out how that pans out for humanity! It's fascinating stuff, and a must-watch, especially if you're a Deus Ex fan. You can catch it here on BBC iPlayer (but this is only available in the UK). The feature starts at 25 minutes in.

Alternatively, you can read about it here on the BBC website but again that's UK-only. If you're outside of the UK, the story plus some video appears here.

Visit raidingparty.net for much more on Deus Ex: Human Revolution and all the other up-and-coming action RPGs titles.

The Deus Ex: Human Revolution release date is 26 August.

We spotted the Newsnight story thanks to a tweet from @hanknova on twitter. Cheers Tim!

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