Not so long ago I discovered this article presenting the CLEAN mapping technique used in Civilization V to manage how detail gets filtered with distance. I found the side effect of emerging anisotropic surfaces very seducing.
This week Angelo Pesce wrote some thoughts on how the problem of how to represent and render detail in general, how normal maps are not so well suited and what can be done instead.
Physically based rendering (PBR) seems to be the hot thing recently in game as well as film industries. Last year at SIGGRAPH Naty Hoffman led a course on physically based shading. The first talk in particular gives some excellent insights on the physics behind lighting.
This year, at SIGGRAPH again, the physically based lighting used in Call of Duty: Black Ops was one of the topics of the course Advances in Real-Time Rendering in 3D Graphics and Games. Keith Judge wrote an article to sum up the ideas presented in this talk in shading language. Sébastien Largarde also has some insights on the shift to physically based shading from a production point of view.
On a narrower topic Rory Driscoll briefly explained the problem of energy conservation, a first but important step toward PBR, in a convincing and straight to the point manner. In articles mentioning normalization factors the origin is not always clear, especially when authors take shortcuts to avoid digressing from their topic. Fortunately Fabian Giesen wrote a demonstration of the normalization factor for the Phong and Blinn-Phong models and Christian Schüler gathered various of the normalization terms we can see in publications, with proper references.
There are many other sources to read, but I will stop there for now. Just follow the links and you have plenty of reading already. ;)
Addendum: Sébastien pointed out this article on energy conservation for wrapped diffuse lighting and this one on physically plausible microfacet BRDF, which includes a WebGL demo to play with.
Update: Tri-Ace has made a couple of presentations on the matter over the last years, which you can find on their research page.
Update: this article, Basic Theory of Physically-Based Rendering, presents the ideas of PBR in a very easy to read manner and works well as an introduction.