Finally
Commercial CG that doesn't make me wish that computers were vastly more expensive! The latest TV spots in the HP Invent ad series are really sharp. (Click, Click.) The CG doesn't get in the way, and they obviously spent a lot of time and thought to make it convey the message that it's effortless to make and manipulate digital images with HP products.
Another bit of CG that I really liked recently was the What Barry Says propaganda short that's been popping up in various places. The visual aesthetic is great, but I most admire the way the transitions play with constructs that only parse correctly from one viewpoint, creating a flowing visual that doesn't jar the viewer despite radical changes in scope and subject. (n.b. the audio track is a little Black Helicopter, turn it down, it won't detract from the visual.)
It's particularly nice to see CG coming out that takes advantage of this "limitation" of computer rendering to create effects that would not be possible if the image were truly 3-dimensional. If the Barry viewpoint tricks were presented as a proper pair of stereo images, you would spot the wires right away. This is the same technique Escher used to make his famous images that fiddled with perspective; taking advantage of the fact that a 2d projection of a 3d scene causes several points in 3-space to collapse to the same point in the picture plane. Since this stuff is my stock-in-trade, I really like it.
Non-geeks stop reading here
As a pedantic aside, it would be possible to recontruct some the HP ads if we
were rendering stereo pairs, but only for the effects in which the actor drapes
the picture frames over his head. You would have to replace the texture that
you had been rendering to the frame with the pixel for his face at the exact
moment that the point on his face intersected the texture plane. The images
that you'd have to use for textures wouldn't be nearly as neat and tidy,
however, since the frame and his face are in motion. It would have to be all
stretched and smeared, as if you'd moved a piece of paper in the middle of a
photocopy. The effects in which the piece of paper "snaps" an image while held
in front of his face would be impossible to make seamless unless you make the
assumption that the viewpoint is infinitely far away, in which case your stereo
pairs collapse to the same image.