Slashdot Mirror
Realistic Human Graphics Look Creepy
WellHungMonkey writes "A really interesting read on Slate about how realistic human faces in games and on robots and so on, are not necessarily the way to go -- the brain isn't fooled, it attaches itself easier to Snoopy-like simplicity... Or Lara Croft attributes, but I'm not sure that's the brain talking."
While simplicity is good, as far as mental-recognition goes, taking simplicity to the max is a bad idea, especially when we have the technology to produce quality-driven graphics. You have to stay around the current level of production quality or you will lose audience. A good example of over-simplification for graphics is demonstrated by the terrible reviews given Radical's unsightly (cell shaded) The Hulk PS2 game. So there's subject matter to consider, as The Hulk was a kind of wacky cartoon/comic, but there was always a darker side to it for me. I was disappointed with the semi-recent Hulk movie, but does that mean the game had to suck too?
For me, a balance of player control with appealing storyline is critical to any video game, and the lack of plausible graphics never helps. Perhaps this could be graphed on a curve or something, but I truly believe there is a balance between all elements of any game or CG film for that matter. Even in film there is still a kind of gameplay, in the physics used and the modes of operations designed to portray the story. Compelling writing fuels the arts, not parlor tricks, so this subject is not exactly cut and dry, by any means... it's very subjective and taste-driven. Another thing to consider is the date that media is designed, because we can all look back at early animation or even live-action special effects and think it looks fake, and the stuff created today will look fake tomorrow. Is there a ceiling to special effects?
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
...as long as the blood spatters are lifelike when I blow their heads off.
Michel Ja...uh...Jefferson.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
This is very true. Ventriloquist dummies are the worst.
Haven't we already discussed the Uncanny Valley before?
If they were, they wouldn't be creepy. That whole sentence about how the brain knows the difference... doesn't that make them not-so-realistic? I mean, I understand that realism is what they're going for, but the tech isn't there yet. I think we all knew that already.
http://xkcd.com/386/
I'd like to see some examples of these pictures. Sure they are creepy, sometimes people can be fooled though. I had a picture of Aki in a bikini from the Final Fantasy movie on my computer. My girlfriend found it and wanted to know why I had it. She didn't beleive me that it wasn't a real person.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
If you are refering to games such as UT2k3/UT2k4, Doom III, Deus Ex: Invisible War, etc. I am wondering what you are referring to as realistic human graphics? Since when did human skin look like it was gone over with mop and glo a few times? All new video game engines for some reason or another want to make evey damn thing in the game shiny!
-illumina+us "I put on my robe and wizard hat..."
...right here .
There's a bit in there about how Aesop's fables are more effective because he used animals rather than people for his characters... interesting stuff.
The Army reading list
Realistic human graphics? You mean pornography?
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
I think the reverse would be true of the porn games. The more realistic it is, the better....
I've stopped playing games a few years ago, so this is just a hypothetical opinion.
:-)
:-|
:-(
This would explain the success Japanese-style anime has. People complain about how the characters have no nose or unrealistic eyes, but it's all symbolic anyways.
Look at the South Park show! The characters are like 3 inches tall, but people watch it for the slapstick humor and such.
Also from Slate, about high-definition TV being bad for porn, because it's just too clear. Everything looks better in porn when it's a bit blurry.
What does this mean for tux-racer? Will hardcore linux advocates be freaked out by his penguin-like qualities?
I had a look at the paper, and noticed they didn't include those robot impersonators, which were the really in-thing back in the late 80's/early 90's.
I wonder where which side of the valley the mimes would be placed?
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Just thought I'd point out that the Discovery Channel has done a story on this in the past, specifically when referring to robot appearance. There is an actual graph of how realistic the face is vs the attitude people take towards it. Though I can't seem to find the link, if I remember correctly it rises steadily until a little bit past "75% realistic", at which point it drops to next to nothing until about "97% realistic" in which it rises back to the top. If someone could find a link to this, that would be great. It may also have appeared sometime on TechTV.
The stupidity of your average American is just about the same as the average European, we simply show it off better.
Recently, Ive thought the same thing. I think it ultimately has to do with how they get thier models. A lot of people dont actually realize that these charactors arent just made up from scratch, throwing together millions of polygons, but rather, they take the subject and put them in a precision 3d scanning device which constructs the model for them. At that point, the facial expressions are largely left up to the development team to take care of, and thats where it all falls apart.
This might seem a bit bizaar, but disney's anamatronics, while always looked fake, had UNCANNY mouth movements and facial expressions. They were so on par, to this day I am still amazed... and wonder why no one else can get that close.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
I've read in a number of places that game developers have discovered that the more "real" the physics engine, the less "fun" a game feels. Of course, for simulations, you do want accuracy. But for other games, you want "just the right amount" of realism to envelop the user in a believable environment, but not so much so that it mimics the somewhat boring constraints of real-life.
The developers have changed Americas Army recently to include realistic "death drops." It is actually VERY creapy to watch someone shot in the head snap back and collapse and then roll down a hill. It really makes you not want to play anymore.
...And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me." - Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984)
It seems as though that 'the movies' have been in the uncanny valley for a little while. I thought that "The Hulk" was very realistic, but it was missing 'something'. I didn't care too much about that but it seems as though most people instantly pointed and said "FAKE!". It's like the 90/90 rule. "The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time". We are now in the last 10% of making realistic CGI humans, and it isn't easy!
If this was true then I really wonder why this doesn't apply to classical art. I mean, if I visit a gallery of the great masters and look into the faces on the paintings I can really attach to it. And so can millions of people. You can see the love, the fear, the hate in these paintings. I know it is not animated but still, humans seem to be capable of creating artificial pictures of themselves. The point, as I see it, is that game developers are just particulary bad at it.
If you know ANYONE who even VAGUELY resembles R2-D2, I want to see pictures!! (yes, I know they were using them as examples of androids, but jesus... I think using C3PO alone would have sufficed
don't flatter yourself
I've observed the same thing in Japanese anime. There was a phase a couple of years ago when everyone tried to make their characters as realistic and human-looking as possible, but these series just didn't do very well. If you look at some current anime now, you'll notice that they have gone back to the "big eyes, small mouth" style in a big way.
Take the Final Fantasy movie was example. The main character, Aki, was voted in some magazine in a top 100 sexiest women.
Yet, Aki is 100% computer generated women and she is doubtlessly looks VERY real-like. In fact, I believe it is the closest we ever got to replicating humans in computer graphics.
This appeared on Slashdot a while ago.
The general premise is that has things move towards looking more life like, at a certain point they end up in the "uncanny valley" if they aren't perfect. This is where things look real enough, but the brain sees something wrong with it.
The human brain (and I'd suspect a lot of other species) is very good at picking up the "attractiveness" of something and a lot of it is subconcious. This obviously has developed for mating as a way of choosing the best possible mate. An example would be looking at a girl, being attracted to her and having no idea why i.e what specific features makes her attractive to you?. The counter example would be looking at another girl and finding her repulsive for one little flaw , say a limp or a mishapen nose, even though the rest of her is fine.
The reason cartoons and classic animation don't cause this is because we don't take them seriously.
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
I read the article, and came away unconvinced.
I buy the starting premise of the article: that as computer render figures get more human, viewers become harsher judges of the figures. Mario was cute, while the much more lifelike CGI Neo, in the Matrix Reloaded, was stiff and zombielike.
Since this becomes more true the better the rendering, the Slate writer concludes that computer rendered humans will always look creepy.
I suspect this is another one of those computers-will-never-be-able-to-act-human arguments. Most people want to reassure themselves that there's something inherently irreproducible about life, and humanity. This desire leads us to predict that computers won't be able to render convincing humans, beat a person at chess, or ever create art.
My guess is that a decade from now, people will look at predictions like those in the Slate article, and laugh.
I've seen paintings that look intensely lifelike, so why should such representations be beyond the capabilities of future computers?
Check out my blog: My Galaxy is Milky Way Adjacent
Most humans are inherently creepy.
Why would machine replicas be any different?
Guess there'd be a market for both realistic and unrealistic human characters in games. Clearly, realistic characters would do very well in RPGs and simulation games like The Sims. Try out the "The Sims 2 Body Editor" for some sense of what to expect from EA soon. It's not bad, nice and realistics. On the other hand, there are games where realistics characters aren't as important, such as FPS games. Who cares about a realistic chin lines on the enemy soldier if you're a few mouse clicks away from turning said realistic character into a corpse with a lovely ragdoll physics system?
Same thing with movies, some will obviously develop more on a "cartoonish" look, such as anime gone 3d. No matter how hard they try, they can never make a 16 year old school girl with blue hair that can handle a 300 foot robot come over as realistic. Then again, eventually, there will be serious movies with close to no real actors in it. It will all be rendered because having a large cluster is cheaper then having Keanu Reeves ruin your movie with some atrocious acting...
Hate me!
I think the original article was referring to the release of Duke Nukem Forever - they probably have some wicked graphics that look just like real people...
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Real humans don't have such perfect symetry. It's true that better symetry is considered more beautiful but nobody has perfect symetry. And people who look too good, ie. too symetrical, do look sort of creepy.
I remember watching a 'making of' show about the first Shrek movie and they said they purposely made the girl less human-like for the same reason. That she got to a point were it was freaky to have her look that human.
I'm not drunk, I just have a speech impediment. And a stomach virus. And an inner ear infection.
I thought about this very thing watching Jude Law play a robotic gigalo. Unless STDs and the fear of AIDS became rampant, would women really want this? Law's makeup was pancaked to show he was not the generation of Haley-Joel.
This is an interesting problem, if we don't continue to attempt to get to 100%, we will never get there - yet going through the 80th to 99th percentile will be creepy.
I don't have any issues doing it in computer gfx. Some of the new techniques used in Pixar's The Untouchables, such as the way hair moves in water - go towards the overall body of knowledge of how to create actors on screen that you don't know are real. The new Spiderman seems mostly CGI, or motion captured and sped up. This eventually makes for better movies, and games in which the protaganist NEEDS to be human is essential.
But in robotics, I even think the face in the new adaptation of Asimov's "I, Robot" is really sinister. I don't see society even accepting that in robotics. I think the farthest people will go is C-3P0.
Don't worry, this problem will be remedied by better graphics cards. People won't be grossed out when they can render Shrek and Gollum in real time. Right now we just don't have the power we need, so I guess the faint of heart will just have to play Mario and Zelda games for the time being.
Anyone care to post some links to the most realistic looking renders you've seen (specifically, of people)?
Just curious, haven't seen what "state of the art" is nowadays.
~Berj
Just Ask Slashdot. Hundreds of Slashdot readers and their ethernet-connected RealDolls(tm) can't be wrong.
Is this why burn victims strike people so oddly? Everyone reacts differently to them, but not usually in a normal way. Once these poor people loose their identities, they become something else, to everyone else. It's not fair to them, they're still them!
-Patrick
"They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."
Someone already said it here about the report... where it goes up to 75%, drops way down until it reaches 97% lifelike.
right now, the real-time rendering is getting to that 75 - 90% mark, so things are looking a bit creepy, but give it a few months or years, and it'll then start to look very, very odd...
...is World of Warcraft.
Blizzard is applying a very stylized cartoonish look to the game, and I think it's much more attractive than the other online games that attempt to be as real as possible.
I first experienced this "these graphics are just good enough to freak me the hell out" effect when playing whatever the flagship basketball game was for the Dreamcast last century. The graphics were great, but the faces and joints looked "off".
/. before, but who cares?
The "Uncanny Valley" has appeared on
The enemies of Democracy are
I'm glad the rest of the world realizes it. I've known I hated looking at people for years now.
This story reminds me of an interview I read in, I think, Wired about the making of Shrek. They made the princess as realistic as possible, but it was looking like an animated corpse. They said something along the lines of "until we have the ability to cross the last 1% of realism, we need to step back a bit".
Or something.
I've got more mod points and GMail invi
I don't think many actors in hollywood look very realistic either. Why, some of them have more plastic surgery than barbie. And yet people still go to watch these movies and idolize these actors who don't even look anywhere near what a normal person looks like. I suppose it's some subconcious idea of unobtainable perfection?
The reason the "realistic" human graphics are "creepy" is that they aren't quite real enough yet. The brain perceives them as looking human, but their actions/reactions are off, and the characters typically aren't very deep intellectually. Once these obstacles are overcome, bridging the uncanny valley, maybe some of the "creepiness" will go away.
:-)
For now, it still looks cool though.
A computer without Windows is like a cake without mustard.
The reason people reach a limit with robots that look real is the perception that "you're being watched". Real people make people just as uncomfortable if they were to sit there, perfectly motionless, staring, or perhaps turning their head robotically to match your every move. No one feels comfortable with that kind of focused attention. So the next step in robotics is to infuse intelligent mannerisms, and etiquette rules (we teach our children not to point and stare, don't we?), so robots would naturally, look away, look around as if in thought, blink, roll their eyes, etc, rather than staring directly.
That's for robots. For games, we're not being watched, so the problem is not the same. We are not made to feel uncomfortable, but rather, just disturbed. It's the same disturbing feeling/reaction we get when we see people with deformities. Because that's exactly what we're seeing in less than perfect game characters: Deformities! AKA: the unexpected.
So it's really the responsibility of the 3D modellers and animators to improve their craft. How hard is it to make 3D characters BLINK? And also make the eyes move around? It's that blank, blinkless stare that makes characters look "dead". Shinyness of the eyes is also important. That's something taught in even the most basic "life drawing" art classes. Without that shine on the eyes, you get the dead fish look.
To me what bugs me most is human animation that is just plain bad or cartoony (and there's more of that than not. I think animators who truly understand human motion are very rare). Silent Hill 2 and 3 did an excellent job with the 3D humans. They don't look 100% real, but they don't look "uncanny" either, because they don't have obvious facial "deformities".
Now I know why the band in Jabba's palace look alot better than Jar Jar. According to this article one is more likely to cut the muppets more slack than computer animation. So Lucas should take note and go back to muppets.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
I liked the stylized, animated cut-scenes in Interstate '76. That was a great game. Ya dig?
Read my keyboard review.
One of the animations for Shrek is doing animations for DOOM 3.
The computer animated movies coming out these days (e.g. Shrek 2, The Incredibles, Polar Express) have realistically rendered humans that are very impressive. Quite a leap from the old days (e.g. Toy Story) where the animation of human characters felt so wrong.
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
This topic reminds me of an old episode of Doctor Who. A society has android robots but people start developing "robophobia." The Doctor says it's because the robots have lifelike responses in all but one area, facial expressions. The robots all have beautifully sculpted but immobile faces, so this freaks people out on a subliminal level, it's like talking to a dead person.
Of course this was partly a sly commentary on the cheapness of the BBC's special effects on the show, of course they didn't have the budget to do really great robot effects, so they just wrote crappy effects into the storyline. But maybe they were on to something, they were ahead of their time in anticipating the social effects of lifelike robots.
Think about how creepy the face of someone looks who has had a stroke. It's quite disturbing at first. Look at a large crowd, everyone looks different! We are very sensitive to facial appearance.
Crushing my karma one post at a time.
"the much more lifelike CGI Neo, in the Matrix Reloaded, was stiff and zombielike"
:).
A realistic portrayal of Keanu Reeves then
I always did like my games and characters to have
that distinctly "computerish" look to them. When
games get too "photo-realistic" they loose their
appeal to me. Guess that's why I'm still
attracted to older games.
That's simply amazing. That picture looks like someone just used the Healing Brush on a Real photo. If you told me that was a real photo cleaned up I'd definitely believe you at first glance. For me personally only the Forehead and of course the shirt look fake.
On the topic at hand I really would rather the people not look totally real in the types of games I play, FPS. But for Adventure/Mystery games (do they make them anymore btw) etc it could be really cool. Of course real looking people with Brain Dead AI will ruin things. I think the graphic component will arrive well before the AI does. I mean if your playing a game and start acting stupid most AI characters just stare blankly into space not commenting. I want to see games where the Characters are like "Hey jackass, stop running around me in circles" etc.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Scott McCloud covered this one too; the more iconic a human figure is, the easier it is for the reader/viewer to identify with it. Conversely, it's possible to anthropomorphize even the most iconic images; the standout example that he gives in his book is an electrical socket that (in the right context) still clearly identifies as a face. If you're interested in the design aspects of this, check out Understanding Comics for more details.
I think this is what killed the Final Fantasy film. The characters were so realistic that my brain accepted them as human--and then spent the rest of the film wondering, "What's wrong with them?" The problem is that we are very sensitive to the subtleties of human behavior. As long as you aren't actually fooled, you are impressed by the quality of the simulation. But if it is good enough for you to take it for human, then what would otherwise be a minor flaw in an excellent simulation suddenly seems like something pathological about another person. So beyond a certain point, if the simulation is not perfect, it starts to seem disturbingly wrong in some undefinable way.
I'd love to see a remake of the Matrix films, in which all of the "in the Matrix" sequences were done with computer animation, like the excellent "Flight of the Osiris" short by the Final Fantasy team. In that context, I think this "problem" would become an asset.
Just make sure you pee ON the cup, not in it.
The most effective games for me were the ones that were not trying to be photorealistic. Early games developers really were on to something employing anime for graphical sequences and character charts.
Robotech was one of the most realistic playstation 2 games I've played. Not because the planes and robots looked like actual real-world weapons. It was because they looked and acted like the weapons from the cartoon series I remembered as a kid.
The animation sequences in Dungeon keeper 2 were absolutely believable. The same animation quality applied to Blizzard's Starcraft was not. Why? Dungeon keeper didn't try to look real, and employed a lot of tongue in cheek cartoony elements. Starcraft tried to be entirely too serious.
And don't get me started on Squaresoft...
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Why did the author choose to use Alias as his prime example, when that game has crappy facial animation? I agree with him, the characters in that game close-up look like shoddy mock-ups of their real-life counterparts, but there are a plethora of games/movies/art with much more realistic-looking humans than that game (or any of the other examples he mentioned). How about Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, or the Flight of Osiris? Those come amazingly close to realistic without looking creepy. Or how about Half Life 2's Source engine that makes facial animation look real? If the author was only going to use examples that supported his point, he may has well have used Space Invaders as an example.
My take is that things will simply keep improving until humans rendered in games do begin to show proper facial expressions. That would make things more immersive in my opinion. But this capability would not only affect games. Once this point is reached it may be hard to imagine but making movies the old fashioned way could go the way of the dinosaur. Imagine that full scale action movies could be made in the not too distant future without pesky actor contracts, etc. Take it a step further and voices could be generated as well removing even voice acting as a requirement. I'm not sure if this would be a good or a bad thing...
"Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right." - Isaac Asimov
The reason why this is so, is because we're in the middle of the scale, inching towards realism. We're not quite there yet and so it looks funny. One day we will have computer games so real we wont be able to tell them apart from reality.
A really good example of how creepy these characters can be is the soon-to-be-released Polar Express movie (http://polarexpressmovie.warnerbros.com/) starring Tom Hanks. The kids look exactly as the author of the article describes: like animated corpses. there is a lot of buzz on the cg and 3d animation forums about why this movie looks so bad, but i think the best answer is that they took a great actor (tom hanks) and motion captured his acting so they could apply it to a cg actor that couldn't act as well.
Now [i]that's[/i] creepy.
Interstate 76? Thanks a lot. You just gave me Schuylkill Expressway flashbacks!
Note to mods: Don't mod down just because you don't get the joke.
if you look at 3d animation today, look at movies like blade 2, the matrix revolations, spiderman, starwars 1-2-3.. they give perfect examples of how we can make believable characters with 3d animation.. all video games are are 3d movies rendered in real time. so in truth, once we have computers that can render starwars epidode 1/2/3 in realtime.. we'll have believable 3d characters.. so nvidia and intel gotta get off their butts and do it :)
It is a fully computer rendered movie, and lots and lots of it looks __GREAT__. Just amazingly detailed, wonderfully warm backgrounds, objects, etc.
But then we get to the people. Very very realistic looking, in still shots. But when you watch the video, they look... well... CREEPY! Amazingly creepy. I couldn't figure out what was wrong... was it a slight problem in the lip-syncing? Or was it just some sort of motion problem (I think most of the movie was shot with motion capture). Or what... I couldn't figure it out.
So then to read this article (yes, I RTFA), and realize that it might be an unsolvable problem... that's a strange thought.
...Lara Croft's attributes!!! Much more!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Metal Gear Solid(TS, 2, 3): non-shiny, "realistic" facial models, but there's something not quite right with the animation.
007-Everything or Nothing: face models and textures taken from actual human actors, still don't animate quite right or look "alive".
Final Fantasy XII: granted, there are only screenshots/movies to go on so far, but again, real-looking faces that don't move quite right.
Going off on a tangent, I've thought every Final Fantasy game that tried to look "real" (VIII, X, X-2, XI) came off as creepy, while the more abstract/toony ones (VI, VII, IX, Crystal Chronicles) were fantastic, in part due to being better able to relate to these abstract characters than not-quite-perfect ones, as the article mentions.
Even with what I've just said, I still think that developers should spend less time on graphics because lately I've seen a bigger focus on graphics and not enough on Gameplay. I think creativity has suffered because of it, meanwhile, the most creative games I've played recently have had pretty crappy graphics, but have insanely fun (i.e. Wario Ware, and some GBA games).
I don't like to sit. Sitting is for people who like to sit.
This is great news for developers of games such as Resident Evil! They don't have to wait till the rendering guys perfect thier art to get the desired effect in the models.
The hands. They're a dead giveaway, especially the fingers.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
This makes me want to go watch Blade Runner... again.
As long as the digital characters are _played_ by humans (as in LOTR with that Shmegal or whatever that guys name is) then it has the potential to look good.
Even if the character is not played by a human it can still have good results. Has this guy not seen any of the animation movies recently? Shrek???
Some of the best game designers understand this, too. Jet Grind Radio, the old Fear Factor series...
Uh...the "Fear Factor" games were renamed to "Fear Effect" quite a few months before their release, which was quite a few years ago now... Nice to see Slate keeping up with the news...
Natural skin texture and optical characteristics are quite difficult. For a long time nobody had done it at all, now I think it just takes a lot more computing power. The skin tones in "Toy Story" were a major technical advance, and used ray tracing. Specular reflection (shiny) is relatively straightforward to do via either ray tracing (the mathematically "correct" method) or faking it by just changing the shade depending on the approximate location of the lighting and angle on each patch of the surface. This can be futzed with to soften it somewhat, else everything would look like it was made of plastic. I don't follow video boards, but this is probably basically what they're doing, because ray tracing would be too computationally expensive.
To do it correctly requires ray tracing not just a single ray (ray tracing is done backwards from eye, off surface, to other surfaces if appropriate, etc.) to the light source, which is computationally expensive already, but at each surface you have to multiply the number of source rays coming from many angles, to approximate the diffuse reflection of light contributed from all surfaces the scene. So each ray can explode into a large number of additional contributing rays. This quickly starts to look a lot like a render-wall problem.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
The author has an inkling of a point, but he is just so cocky it's aggravating me to the point of not believing anything he says. I have officially flipped the bozo bit on him.
Btw, in the article that he mentions, the uncanny valley isn't the end of it, it's just a dip before achieving perfection. Sure it's true that right now we have graphics that are getting very close but not quite there yet, but it doesn't mean we should start backtracking towards Leisure Suit Larry characters drawn on all of 18 pixels of canvas.
Oh and making comments about Picasso's motives? How much more conceited can you get?
that is really good, but as the original poster said, the shirt looks fake, to me the eyes give it away, although they don't look 'lifeless', they still seem to be missing something.
one hand does look a little mannequin-esque, but i think the skin is what gives it away, at least for me.
That is in my own opinion... My favorites are still games with graphics like simcity 2k, not 3k or 4k or other modern crap.
This article completely misses the real point. Computer Graphics are made to be more lifelike by two things. ANIMATION and GRAPHICS. And in order to look good, or creep you out less, the animation is far more important.
;o)
If a character with pretty bad graphics moves perfectly with great animation (whether it be exaggerated cartoon style or realistic) then it'll look good, because it has "life and soul".
If a character looks amazing, but moves like a wooden puppet, one limb at a time, then there's your "creepy" look. It just doesn't wash, the audience is lost, no involvement, wow that looks quite pretty but lets move on.
Problem is that the more complex a character, ie the better it looks (assumption complex=better not necessarily true), the harder it is to animate properly. For Aki they had something like 20 animators devoted to just her hair she was that complicated.
Why do you think everybody in the film was basically bald?
You make a good point - if the human face is not perfectly real but has an appealling artistic style to it, the emotional response is still strong. The example game in the Slate article is Alias; a look at the screens shows us a fairly boring series of images - the character mimics Jennifer Garner's well-known face but doesn't do it perfectly, nor does it do so stylistically. There's nothing dramatic or impressive about her 3D model or her environment.
A perfect contrast is the Splinter Cell series. Sam Fisher does not look like a real human, though he's very close. He should be at the drowning point of the Uncanny Valley. Yet Splinter Cell elicits some very strong responses from players - why? Because the game is rife with style.
I think Half Life 2 is about to prove this article wrong as well ;o)
...first person shooters won't be much fun because the enemies will be rendered so realistically and behave so naturally that you won't be able to kill them (unless you're some kind of psycho). Instead of exploding or vanishing like in current games, they'll lie there for the whole game, calling out weakly for their mothers, pleading for help, choking on their own blood. Doesn't sound like much fun to me!
But I'm probably just nitpicking semantics....
No, that's actually the whole point of the Uncanny Valley.
To take the red pants, red shirt analogy:
The point is: we're trying to get the pants ever closer to matching the shirt, but it's proving really difficult to do. As we get closer and closer to matching, we're finding out that human perception has a finer resolution than we previously though. And the closer the shirt and pants get to matching, the more distracting it becomes, and the more the detail and not the whole becomes the focus of our attention.
The previous poster was trying to suggest that as technology improves, we will indeed be able to make the pants match the shirt perfectly, and there will be no divide.
Many people tend to doubt that. Most feel we're working with two entirely different fabrics, and human perception is so good that exact matching just isn't possible. Therefore, they feel it's better to focus on complementary style.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
1) Hollywood et all would be forced to allow people to age more naturally on screen, allowing (and requiring) more realistic casting. No more 28-year-old Hollywood stars cast as high school seniors.
2) Casting people who are naturally or un-conventionally beautiful would become the norm, instead of people who are mere canvases for make-up artists.
I find that European television (and films) have always had a more natural approach when it came to make-up and casting for actors and actresses. British TV characters are far less likely to look like they just had a manicure after every shot.
I think this would help improve peoples self esteem greatly, if all their heroes and roll models resembled real people more often.
I thought that the CGI sequences of Neo were the less zombie-like moments in Keanu's acting career. ;)
Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, though I'm not yet sure about the universe. - A Einstein
with Robin Williams for a long time.
I'm curious where you served. No disrespect at all intended.
I had some buddies in the 82nd who were in Somalia and knew some guys who'd been in Bosnia, and we had a couple of guys who'd been in the first Iraq war. Thankfully, I never "got the chance" to go to war.
Incidentally, I agree with the sibling poster who says that it's better to have people play FPS to learn that they're not invulnerable.
Why should I argue rationally with someone being irrational? I'll just mock them instead.
I don't know. the half life 2 faces didn't look too creepy to me. they looked great.
Perhaps the creepiness is in part to blame for the designers lack of education in the field of human facial expression and such.
I argue that even if skin textures are just a bit off in games, and even if there are little whirring noises in androids, humans will have no trouble relating so long as the entity smiles correctly.
I understand that the article states that its the very subtle, basically tiny "offs" that are the creepiness factor, but I think it is the wax museum effect.
Those wax replicas in a museum look very realistic. but thier facial expressions are horrid! they smile, but do NOT look lifelike
In half life 2, at least from the trailer, the characters didn't seem to bother me at all.
I believe this is the result of the development team wisely bringing in an expert on such matters, rather than trying to tackle this subtle bit of human interaction on thier own.
The facial expressions in Half-Life 2 are all based on the work of Dr. Paul Eckman's work at the University of California on the taxonomy of facial expressions, and it is amazing just how much emotion the models can express with 40 animated facial muscles, ranging from noticeable sadness to anger to giddiness.
How many programmers and/or electronic engineers are considered experts at social interaction?
Of course something that looks like a human being, but it does not behave exactly like one, would be creepy. But, given enough time, graphics/robots will come to a point that they are not creepy any more.
Imagine a robot at ST:TNG Lt Data's level. Is that creepy ? I don't think so.
And the humans in Half Life 2 don't seem creepy at all. Especially the girl has tremendous facial expressions, so life-like (unlike Doom III, where characters are indeed like zombies).
Well: men have two brains to think with, but only enough blood to use one at a time.
Intelligent Design: because MATH is HARD.
And the elbows! I guess they didn't quite figure out how to model skin and the underlying flesh compressing and folding. If you look really carefully, you might also notice a complete lack of any kind of folding at her armpits as well, but you can't seem much of that, since one is mostly hidden and the other's in shade.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
2D.
SNES
Best game system ever!
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
It's odd how the Government's recent use of American soldiers has modified the public's perspective of soldiers in general. The main purpose of a soldier is to fight. These people are recruited and trained to kill, not to be social workers, prison guards, traffic cops, etc. (IMO, this is the most important reason why American troops should not be in Iraq. The "soldier-ing" is done!) To that end, I would think that the military would *want* people with a "death fetish" and/or people who can handle seeing other peoples' body parts blown off.
... game designers may never be able to capture that last 1 percent of realism. The more they plug away at it--the more high-resolution their human characters become--the deeper they'll trudge into the Uncanny Valley.
If you try and build a jet that can pass through the sound barrier you'll inevitably fail. It's a physical impossibility, it'll shake itself apart! Nobody can travel faster than sound!
He's talking about the personalities that make up the two hills on either side of her uncanny valley.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
In an ep of Doctor Who (Robots of Death) was bandied about the term "Grimwade's Syndrome", a made-up name for a made-up condition where people go crazy in close quarters with robots, because they lack the usual body language to let humans know there are humans in the room.
Not much in Doctor Who turns out to be startlingly prescient, but that certainly did. Grimwade's Syndrome is the best way to describe what the article is talking about - the discomfort of interacting (even one-way, via movie screen) with a "thing" that looks human while every intuitive sense in your brain screams not human.
There's a lot that can be talked about here. I watch our pet bunnies interact with our cat - the cat doesn't try to eat them, which is interesting in itself, but more interesting is how the bunnies respond to the cat. They are confused by her. She is, to them, an only slightly funny-looking bunny, but frustratingly she does not "speak" their language. She doesn't make bunny body language, nor does she respond to it when the bunnies try to communicate with her via body language. I imagine what the bunnies are experiencing is similar to our notional Grimwade's Syndrome, they're interacting with a creepy simulacrum of a bunny that doesn't act quite right.
Or consider this. Because we actually have an "FPU" (Face Processing Unit) in our brains, we pick up on degrees of subtlety in faces - we have perhaps a too-strict sense of beauty, in terms of which faces we find pleasing (ever stop to think how important symmetry is in a face?) - and we see faces anywhere there is even a remotely facelike shape, including the Moon. (I suspect it will come to be the defining characteristic of the human species that we can see a human face there - machine vision systems and alien intelligences will both stare at it and say "I still don't see it".)
Humans therefore tend to react very strongly (understatement) to anything that makes the "FPU" work too hard. If it's sorta like a face but has big things wrong with it, it's "ugly" - maybe even to the point of being a "monster", be it an eyeless skull, a Grey Alien, or a person with a deformity or disfigurement. What IS an ideal, simple thing for the FPU to play with? We may describe an attractive person as "easy on the eyes" but I'd also make a case that the face detector also has an easy time with Hello Kitty, and Hello Kitty looks nothing like Jennifer Connelly. And people tend not to be scared of the "faces" found on the fronts of some cars (unless the driver is a maniac or the car is a Cuda) or of the man in the Moon for that matter, who is greatly distorted and asymmetrical at that. But hey, it's a complex and poorly understood system.
What's interesting is what happens to people who've had damage to that part of the brain. Did anyone else catch the show - mighta been Scientific American Frontiers - where they profiled a guy who had a head injury and now believes his family have been replaced by clones? The kicker was that when they CALLED him and spoke to him over the phone, he believed it was really them, but in person he was certain, despite all better knowledge, that these were not his parents, these were replicants of some kind. Something to do with the part of his brain that considers a person familiar, was malfunctioning, and something at a higher level in his brain was getting uncomfortably confused between people who LOOK like his parents but do not register lower-level feelings of recognition like his parents would. The compulsion to believe this overrode all his better sense: he KNEW these were his real parents, but couldn't make it real in his head.
We're ALL in that boat now with CGI. Our brains are confused: our FPUs are satisfied that the faces look real, but everything else is wrong, the movement is wrong, the behavior is wrong. We process what we're seeing as some kind of weird painting or a reanimated corpse. (And yes, Michael Jackson does trigger this response now that much of his face doesn't move normally when he speaks.) That creepy
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
IIRC the key to a naturally-looking ray-traced skin (or any natural material for that matter) is twofold -
* selecting a proper BRDF (bidirectional reflectance distribution function), which is very hard to get right even for a simple things like milk or paper
* accounting for a surface translucency, ie the fact that the ray hitting the surface not only gets reflected or diffused back into the air, but also partially absorbed by the surface itself. See here for details (sample renderings included).
Similarly to the what parent post said, both are very CPU-intensive problems, so you can go either with a brain-pleasing still picture of railgun bearer or an actual gameplay
3.243F6A8885A308D313
To quote from a Salon article entitled The Best Game Ever:
... With the all-text Nethack, the preferred graphics card is your mind's eye. This enables you to feel real terror, say, at the approach of an innocuous letter "C" hopping toward you across the screen -- since it represents the cockatrice, an occult-spawned dungeon fowl whose bite turns heroes to stone. With little predigested visual mediation between game play and your imagination, you'd often get the sense that you were, so to speak, playing against the game itself.
But beneath these primitive graphics is a game of such richness and endless variation it usually takes years to master, if at all.
The best graphics are those that don't get in the way of the game.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
I believe that they toned down the realism of the charactors in HL2 because when they first did them they where too real looking, and seemed out of place and wrong.
bunnyhopping jerkweeds you find in games like CounterStrike.
As a pretty fanatical quake player I feel I need to clarify this comment. Bunny hopping is a side effect of the physics in the quake engine(s) where jumping and side stepping at the same time could give a speed boast. In CS, and the half-life engine in general, bunny hoping only makes you look stupid without offering any extra speed.
Often times the suggestion of something is more emotionally powerful than the detailed representation of it. This is something Hitchcock used to great effect in his films, and is part of the reason why the most truly frightening movies are often the ones that don't show much gore.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
The animators didn't have a good grasp on (and probably didn't have the technology to model) realistic facial movements. They didn't convey a great deal of emotion.
IAADA (I am a digital animator), and I'd like to point out that you're batting 0.500 in regards to this snippet. While it's true that the facial animation and a sizeable portion of the body language in the final product (no pun intended) both fell short of accurately conveying human-like emotional dynamics, declaring that the animators didn't know part of their craft (referring only to facial animation/body language), greatly oversimplifies the issue; what it mostly boils down to is Time.
Firstly, the entire FF:TSW staff was comprised of some of the best in the business, bar none. Without getting too technical, the modeling techniques available to the modeling staff at the time of production could've indeed sufficed. In regards to complex organic surface modeling, I'm referring to NURBS ("Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines" - a type of curve) Patch Modeling: simply put, a technique involving only curves, where a modeler produces "patches" of any size one-by-one, and then "stitches" them together. Think of it roughly as tailoring a dress made only out of patches and with no visible seams, with as many patches as you'd like. The result: any desired surface, composed of any number of individual regions, each one able to infinitely deform itself while able to affect other nearby patches accordingly. However, patch modeling is painstakingly time-intensive, increasing nigh-exponentially when the amount of patches comprising a surface is increased. This in turn affects the animators' control, giving them near-infinite possibilities for motion, but also increasing the workload tremendously.
IIRC, the characters in FF:TSW were in fact modeled using NURBS patches, but as I mentionned before, the number of patches used could've been two, five, or even tenfold, had the staff been given that much time to work on them. For example, compare the facial animation and body language in FF:TSW to the animation in The Animatrix's "Final Flight Of The Osiris", which was largely produced by the same team. If I may indulge, note the sly glance that the female lead throws to her male counterpart, when they find themselves on the Osiris' bridge just after their sword fight. That quarter-second of motion is nothing short of stunning, as was the rest! Why? Consider the running time of this short film compared to the full-length FF:TSW. Granted, the production schedule was shorter yet not proportional, while the modeling and animation technologies changed very little (granted, this is up for debate).
So there you have it! If anything, the fact that the picture was already 2 years overdue when released leads me to place the blame for the "... [lack of] light in their eyes, or any of the other subtle facial clues we look for when talking to someone" largely on the producers trying to bite off more than they could chew. I'm certain that everyone on the team could pick up a share of the blame, but IMHO the entire endeavour was a laudable effort nonetheless, which greatly upped the bar in terms of achieving life-like digital animation. Cheers!
Good facial animation has been done for some time. As a good fairly receant example, watch Shrek. Despite Shrek being non-human, his facial expressions are quite real. Why? Becuase it was done the classic way: You film the voice actor delivering their lines, and animate the face to match the real expressions. Works quite well since our expressions tend to fit what we are saying.
In FF, they tried to animate the expressions in a vaccuum based off of what they thought they ought to look like, and looking at their own faces. Doesn't work so well. There isn't a way for computers to calculate facial expression, at this point, so you need a good reference. Currently, the voice actor is one of the best.
Had they done it that way, the movie would have been much more real. Not saying you won't see subtile detail lost to animation, but really, the expressions in Shrek are GOOD when you get down to it.
(That's partly why our pets seem so intelligent and humanlike.)
My pet human seems very humanlike, although it never struck me as very intelligent.
There's actually a disorder that causes some people to not be able to identify faces, and many neurologists believe that it's a significant chunk of the brain devoted to identifying faces.Here's a page written by someone who suffers from Prosopagnosia(face blindness
Thanks to the internet, we can now all die alone together! -SomeWoman
I just played Hordes of the Underdark. I wanted to puke in the cutscene where the Valsharess tries to seduce the character. They have no problem making realistic drawings of her with depth and shadow, even making her come out looking pretty hot, but the game engine does not pull this off at all. Granted, Neverwinter Nights doesn't have the most sophisticated engine out there, but it's a fairly recent game which can on occasion stress fairly recent hardware, so the top of the line can't be a whole lot better.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
"It's as if all the characters have been shot up with some ungodly amount of Botox and are no longer able to make Earthlike expressions."
and this is different from your average Britney Spears interview with Ryan Seacrest......how?? =)
This explains it.
mt
In his treatise on the comic book medium, "Understanding Comics," writer/artist Scott McCloud commented on what's basically the same phenomenon. For the purposes of the book, which was done in comic style, the host was a very stylized/simplified caricature of McCloud himself. In describing the reasons behind such stylization, he comments on how it forces the reader to move beyond surface characteristics, and focus on the message being portrayed. In other words, it's a artistic trick to keep the reader focus on the substance, not the style.
This article kind of reminded me of that. Particularly considering that, in most video games, too much detail can distract from the specific goals of the game. The point is not to achieve artistic realism: you're not producing a travelogue, you're playing a game. In particular, stylized characters allow us to identify more closely with the figure, as we read our own preconceptions into the "gaps" in the portrayal, which is arguably even more important in video games than it is in comics, given that you're more likely given the role of the video game character to play than the comic book figure.
Within reason, of course. Striking the balance between total simplicity (say, a stick figure, or a dot) and abject photorealism is probably the trickiest part of the whole bargain....
Sean Daugherty "I have walked in Eternity -- and Eternity weeps."
Wasn't it like 5 years ago when they said they would never be able to render hair realisticly...anyway this happens in real life to me all the time...like when you see a woman from far away and they look normal but then you get close up and her face is burried in makeup. errruugg...it gives me shivers. i mean make-up is cool for changing how you look...like a costume or something but 99 times out of 100 women would look much better without. I mean all those ferckels character lines and shit are there for a reason..to make you look human. Molly Ringwald looks like a robot...along with every person younger then 20, and i don't know which is worse looking like a robot or trying to look like someone who is younger then 20....That says worse things about a person to me then a zit or a wrinkle or uneven skin tones do
stendec@gmail.com
I think this goes along the same lines as realistic looking dolls. They are creepy...maybe because of their frequency in horror movies.
I agree so far, this is the best I've seen so far. What made me thing this was real the the mouth area. The lips and chin show very nice surface realism and light reflection. What gave it away were the "glass" eyes.
It's as if all the characters have been shot up with some ungodly amount of Botox and are no longer able to make Earthlike expressions....
And this is different from real Hollywood actors how?
In Soviet Russia, Chuck Norris will still kick your ass.
You can already do that now with flight sims and driving sims etc, but certain things just can't used like that because the input device technology is not sufficient.
Into which category do you believe dancing simulations fit? The latest one for PS2 uses a 3'x3' platform for the feet and a camera for the hands.
If CG humans don't look 'realistic,' and instead look 'creepy,' then your 'realistic humans' aren't realistic, unless you're shooting for a 'creepy' CG human. Once they get to the point where they're not unintentionally-creepy, only THEN have you achieved 'realism.'
The same fear may explain such things as why some people hate ... movies/shows where a doll/puppet/ventriloquist dummy come to life.
Is that why "Pinocchio" with Roberto Benigni sucked? Or was it because of the horrible casting (Benigni should have played Geppetto for crying out loud) and the horrible voice dubbing for the U.S. market?
In a game, you invariably respawn or reload from an earlier point. Sure, some people play "iron man" games where there is no saving, but that's rare, I suspect. Heck, most FPSes will currently save your game automatically before you run into a dangerous spot.
I can personally attest to the odd mindset that can leave. I was working with some electronics at one point, shortly after a long gaming session. As I was reaching for some components, I realized I'd better first check to be sure everything was turned off and unplugged. THe thought right afterwards of, "Eh, I can always restore a save point" caused me sober up immediately and put off that work until I'd some sleep under my belt. *shrug* Or maybe I've just got a weak grasp of reality.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
In his series of books with Lije Baley and R.Raneel Olivaw, the Robots of Dawn....so in my book this is either old news or Asimov's forsight into the human condition is uncanny.
That is the most realistic image modeled image I have ever seen. I think the skin and the eyes give it away for me, but I could easily mistake this for a photoshopped photo.
While playing the demo of Far Cry, I actually made a double-take after blowing a mercenary away. The reaction on impact of my bullets, the body tumbling and crumpling and then its pose as it lay on the ground. It kind of creeped me out for exactly the reasons brought up in the topic.
Another point scored by the makers of Far Cry : makes some players cross the mental line between fun-filled slaughter fests and the notion of killing human beings.
I had a few people I know, not comptuer savvy people, who did not believe that the actors in Final Fantasy: The Dreams Within were pure digital creations. They were undoubtedly fooled. Heck, I was fooled half the time. And more processing power will only improve that over time.
So I think empirical evidence has already disproven this article. It's premise was undermined before it was even written. While games may not yet have reached that level of sophistication, I believe it is only a matter of time... and games like Half Life 2 are the ones leading the way.
Raven
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
# Lack of sleep.
There are no save points. If you die you must start over. You can be attacked at any time. If you shut the game off, the next time its started events are generated in an accelerated time frame, and you won't be able to respond.
# Equipment Failure. (M16's really don't like sand.)
ProbabilityOfFailure = 90 - 90.0 / (LevelOfSandInAtmosphere);
if (randion() % ProbabilityOfFailure == 0)
{
PlaySound ("m16_click.wav");
Player.M16.FireRate = 0;
Player.M16.State = JAMMED;
Player.State = WTF;
}
# Boredom. (For most of the battle, you are just sitting there.)
Player.State = BORED;
# Running around in chem suits under a desert sun.
You just need to get that special USB 2.0 enabled Heat Lamp
generated in an accelerated time frame...
For the time equivalent to the time you weren't playing.
-if (randion() % ProbabilityOfFailure == 0)
+if (random() % ProbabilityOfFailure == 0)
I kind of like the creepiness of the realistic robots. Isn't that what made the Bladerunner world and Terminator so much better then the goofy 50's robots that look like tin cans.
The Denver artist DeAndrea specializes in life-casting or latex sculptures that have life-like skin. I've seen a few and they are very erie.
If many (most?) geeks have some level of Asperger's, do they react differently to human representations (even those close to, or in, the "uncanny valley") than those who do not have Asperger's? Do they react more favorably to these images, less, or the same - as toward real-life humans? Do "artistic geeks" with Asperger's create "Asperger-like" CGI human representations (that is, does a person with Asperger, who is also a CGI artist, project their viewpoint onto their CGI humanoid constructs)?
I get this sense that they do - some here are proclaiming that "this doesn't look right, that doesn't, etc" (like discussion over FF:The Movie) while other geeks are saying "OMFG, it is beautiful, so well done - w00t!" (ok, that was a little over the top) - why the difference? Was the former non-Asperger's, and the latter was? Thus, that individual is better able to relate to the imperfect CGI? Furthermore, how does this relate to other examples of the "uncanny valley" - do individuals who purchase Real Dolls (for either sex, "dress-up", or collecting - yeah, there are collectors, strangely enough) have a higher incidence of Asperger's?
Thoughts...?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Also, she totally failed the Voight-Kamp.
For the popular version, read Keanu Reeves bitching about what it's like to be an actor who's been thoroughly digitized.
There's a moment in the very beginning of the movie when Carrie-Anne [Moss]' character dives through the window. You see these two guns go by the camera, and the camera moves past her face. She goes out the window and down, and there is nothing real about that. Nothing. No guns, no girl, no window.
Games are running a few years behind that level of realism. They'll get there.
I think we are beginning to run afoul of the Law of Diminishing Returns. Is it really worth expending thousands of man hours and even more clock cycles on a lifelike 3-D approximation of a real person, when there are billions of very real people wandering around the planet looking for work? Just film them and digitally insert them. It takes whole teams of artisans and programmers months to build one that is only 99% human...and they still normally need an actor to lend voice, motion and personality to their digital automaton. After a point, you have to ask yourself: is this really neccessary? Can I tell the story or play the game without going to these lengths?
I am sure the suits in Hollywood would love nothing better than to own their very own CGI Brittany Spears, complete with the little "TM" tatooed on her butt, but I doubt it will ever be cost effective. And the audience will probably still know.
I recently read a book by Ray Harryhausen, who mentioned that his goal was never to make anything look TOO real...because it would lose the dream-like quality that makes fantasy appealling. I tend to concur.
Hasn't anyone else noticed that the live-action versions of beloved childhood cartoons almost always flop? I personally found the live action Grinch to be REALLY disturbing. Disney's Dinosaur sent kids screaming out of the theatre with it's "realism". The rubber-suited, miniature-stomping Godzilla handily outgrosses the made in America, ultra-real CGI version.
3-D CGI has some marvelous cinematic uses, but it is often taken too far. Half of art is knowing when to stop...
zeros and ones cannot trick the brain in the same way that an analog paintbrush does. Paint is a perfectly smooth, organic transition from hue to hue and our brain appreciates that.
There are absolutely no limits to how far we can make robots look human-like and cute.
Just look at Lucy.
Why, she looks so natural and loveable, I doubt any of us would find her threatening or repugnant.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
No kidding! I had a friend who was an airline industry worker, and every time we saw the "Aircraft Control Simulato" game in a videogame store, we always used to joke about how people sit at their desk and drag cigarettes like mad while tearing their hair out and getting no sleep.
It's like, the most stressful job in the world. Why anyone would want to simulate that is faaaar beyond me.
And if you've seen the preview for the new movie The Polar Express, then you'd see that there is a margin between NEAR PHOTO-REALISTIC and ABSOLUTELY REAL (BUT NOT) that is offensive to the brain as well as the eye.
It seems like there will be a quantum leap in graphical representations of nature (at least human form) from "almost there", to "there". Just wait till your in the theaters and see the preview for this (if you've already seen the latest Harry Potter, you're likely to have seen it last weekend) [...yes go ahead, start an offtopic commentary if you must... ]
In final analysis, all efforts of designers and programmers alike to create a lifelike representation of the human form on screen will contribute to what will eventually be "the best damn CGI character I've ever seen!"
--- Das einzige, das wir zu fürchten haben, ist die Furcht selbst.
What the author misses is that after you come back out of the uncanny valley, you'll get characters that really look human. That sort of thing should be possible soon.
As far as the animation goes, it just sounds like they didn't do a good job with synching up the lips, etc. Not that it's imposible, just that they failed.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
My god, yes. I was watching that video for the first time - I recall it vividly - when one of the faces started to slightly distort. I felt the icy cold of horror move down my spine - it just totally horrified me. I have often wondered why it had such an effect. So subtle, the changes were - more dramatic would have been less horrifying. Ugh, scary to think about it still.
blakespot
-- Heisenberg may have slept here.
iPod Hacks.com
...and now this ?
Ah, the joy of context sensitive advertisement.
*boo-hooo*
I remember reading that when originally developing The Sims, the development team started out using motion capture for all of The Sims movement. After capturing some motions, they decided to use an animator (I believe Eric Hedman), in lieu of motion capture. The reason they gave was because the animator was able to better animate the Sims than motion capture. I believe this has everything to do with what this article is talking about. We can pick out the inconsistencies too easily, so it's better to just animate the cartoon people. That's what we expect.
Reminds me of that Manga Chobits. XD
Sooner or later, us losers are gonna become attracted to our computers. n' stuff.
like, particularly in regards to the Asia Carrerra skin......
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts."
Yeah, I noticed this in Shrek. I was much more willing to believe Shrek as a green ogre with hair all over him, dousing himself with a mud shower, then I was the humans that came running after him 30 seconds later. They tried to make the humans look real and normal and my brain didn't buy it.
Lord Farquaad, on the other hand, was very believable, because they stopped short of trying to make him look real. It was more like a caricature. The same with Shrek as a human in Shrek 2.
RP
I wouldn't say game developers or the at least the artists involved are bad at it, it's just the nature of computer-generated art in general.
What I mean is that a real painting has random-ish imperfections that somehow convey emotion, perhaps what the artist was feeling when he/she was creating the painting. Take a look at some impressionist art, like from say Monet. It's not so much about what you're seeing, but more about what you feel when you see the painting.
I think we humans in general rely a lot on emotions when it comes to recognizing things that are living/natural. If there's a painting of a few kids playing in a garden, you would feel the way the artist felt when he/she was there at the actual scene ( perhaps unconsciously ) through the little brush strokes within the painting.
It's just so difficult to have the same feeling with computer since the computer has a lot of control over the final product. Yes a physical paint brush and a computer are both tools, but you are still physically in control of where the paint goes with a paintbrush. It's just that the little imperfections that come from a computer generated piece of work seem too ( excuse my poor choice of words here ) rigid, and symmetric.
The principle is the same. It's almost human, but not quite. Very unsettling.
Dib: "I can only hope that the Irkens just happen to use the same operating system that I do!"
Why bother with usb? Just use the latest P4 (or Athlon, I'm not biased) to heat up the room you are in.
warning: This post is likely to contain gobs of dripping sarcasm. Consume at your own risk.
DISCLAIMER: I was a soldier for 11 years, including a stint running Basic Training courses.
Soldiers - counter, perhaps, to what the video game experience might lead you to beleive - are NOT supposed to be souless killing machines. Quite the contrary, you want your soldiers to be highly moral.
Killing someone is the ultimate violence that you can do to them. Doing so with state sanction is something that needs to be taken VERY seriously. You need a soldier who is capable - when the situation demands it - of killing without hesitation, but you also need them to be able to STOP killing just as quickly.
When you remove the morality from soldiering, you wind up with things like the recent pictures that came out of that prison in Iraq. Amoral soldiers take matters into their own hands, and may wander off into some very dark places.
Furthermore, the days of mass armies composed of highly specialized, single-purpose troops seem to be behind us. Modern soldiers must be able to adapt to roles far beyond just "kill the enemy" - just read up on what goes on in any UN peacekeeping mission.
The more complex the mission becomes, the more complex and adaptable the soldier must become to meet the requirements of the mission.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Not to mention that getting hit in the head hard enough to knock you out may cause permanent brain damage that can plague you for the rest of your life (http://www.amenclinic.com).
Also the Adam's Apple. Oh wait, you're talking about CGIs.
I've seen paintings that look intensely lifelike, so why should such representations be beyond the capabilities of future computers?
Because paintings don't move. The stills tend to look perfectly realistic, or at least close enough to suspend disbelief most of the time. The problem is, the motion doesn't look natural. That's what the subconscious recoils against.
-1, "1337" speak
I have a paintball story for you.
A few years ago, I was getting ready to go off on a military training course where I was going to be doing a lot of running around in the bushes. To help get myself in shape, I started playing paintball in full uniform, helmet, and webbing - the idea was to train myself in conditions as close as I could get to the real thing.
Even though most paintball games were broken up into "teams", your average paintballer was a lone wolf type who did not play well with others.
Well, one day I linked up with a guy from another regiment who was doing the same sort of thing that I was. We started working together as a military fire team - fire and movement, supressive fire, etc - and we absolutely CLEANED HOUSE on the kids.
It served as a double education. For us, it was great to see that fire and movement actually works in practice. For them... well, maybe they didn't learn all that much, because all they ever did was bitch about how "unfair" it was when they got steamrolled. Shit, it's SUPPOSED to be unfair; we're not trying to give the bad guys an even break here.
Bottom line is that in combat, teamwork is LIFE.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
I use the mouse wheel to change weapons in combat games like MOHAA and BF1942, and the wheel is starting to go south, resulting in unrequested weapons changes that almost always lead to my death.
This article was writen by someone just screaming to try and have an origional idea and offer the appearence of insight into gaming.
Realisim isn't just about gameplay, it's about progressing computer technology. Games have no doubt been able to help push the industry foward in the realm of graphics. It won't be long before we see the quality of CG work found in "Finding Nemo" in real-time game play. Digital technology is getting pretty close to replicating human beings. If artists can do it on paper, I'm sure artist can do it digitally.
Even more, for trickly stuff, like the way the eye shines differently from different angles, we have the advantage of being able to use complex algorythems in real time to make things look right.
This article could of been writen when "Doom" came out about how we shouldn't use 3D in games because it looks worse than 2D. If people would of listened to a nutjob like this back then we'd all be playing side-scrollers.
Realisim should be decided based on the games needs. Some games, like Medal of Honor, just wouldn't work if everything looked cartoonish. Others, like Mario Cart, look great because they are cartoonish, simple, fun games-- You play Mario Sunshine however and it becomes hard to relate to the catoon figures speaking in the cutscenes, good thing the game has no depth or it would of flopped... oh wait.
Realistic games have more acceptance amoung the older crowds as well, I know a few people who won't play a game if it's not realistic enough for them.
I hate people like this writer. They should shut up unless they have something worthy to say.
I can't sit through a movie with fighter jets without pissing everyone else off.
"No, you fool...you cannot launch a missile while the aircraft is on the ground!" (well...you can, but it's hard and you can't do it solely from the cockpit) (something with Michael Douglas)
"No, the runway is NEVER next to the main gate" (James Bond)
"If you shot off all your missiles, how come you now have 3 more? (All of them)
"um, no. A 'modified' F-117 is NOT big enough to hold a squad of people inside" (Air Force One)
"No, you can't outrun a missile for that long. Either it would have run out of fuel, proximity detonated, or hit you by now." (Behind Enemy Lines)
Hair and uniforms. (All of them)
"If you're going to call them Air Force planes, at least use Air Force planes. F-18's don't count." (The Rock, ID4)
and don't get me started on Iron Eagle:
"No, you fool...you cannot plug your flight helmet into your Walkman!"
One of the problems is resolution. Hold your hands about 3 or 4 feet apart beside your eyes. You can still see your hands. Now consider a monitor 4 feet x 4 feet, 1440 dpi, 24 bits per pixel. At 30 frames per second you can have quite a realistic face to face interaction with your computer. How can 1024 x 768 come close?
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
In the beginning of one of the E3 demos for Half-life 2, they show a face of the "G-man" (or whatever you call him) in his old school HL1 form. The screen fades away and the HL2 version of himself appears. The difference is amazing. The old face looks like a square block with some hair on top of it compared to the new face. The new G-man also pulled off some very believable expressions that the old models would never come close too. In the video, you can hear people laugh as he smiled like a horny old man.
If you ask me a cube with some textures on it the resemble a face are ALOT more creepy than what has been coming out recently. I think it's good and important that animators and graphics artists keep striving for perfection. Some of the results might seem creepy, but this is shouldn't be a reason for computer graphics artists to switch directions.
I think some people are trying too hard to MAKE themselves believe that what they are seeing is real. They should realize that movies and games are all fake and are there to provide us for a temporary escape from our real lives. If you're creeped out by some fabricated thing on your monitor/tv screen, I'd hate see how you'd react to some one actually getting shot...or maybe even a spider for that matter.
Abaddon: An Xbox 360 Indie game
Ever ghost a teammate in America's Army (before version 2.1) and panned around? Sometimes if your subject was standing next to wall your point view would get crammed into the body of the solider itself. At this point you were looking out at the world from his insides. It appeared as a crude wireframe for the most part. For the other part, the developers rendered the backs of the teeth and gums inside the head. Let me tell you, this looked so damn creepy the first time I saw it I couldn't stop staring at it. I later wondered why they bothered rendering the teeth if you can't even see them from the outside anyway? It had to be to creep people out. Had to be. *shiver*
Speak truth to power.
McCloud makes a similar point in terms of why simple "cartoony" characters are easier to relate to. Typically, your own subjective "vision" of yourself is a schematic smiley face (2 eyes, and simple mouth), whereas views of other people are more realistic and "objective".
Check out this Understanding Comics--it's an insightful analysis of how comics are an excllent medium of communication, and breaks down how they work.
"Stop poking meeee!"
hehe
The article is titled 'The Unded Zone'. Off to the side where it says 'Also in Slate' are several pictures. Including one of Ronald Reagan. Freaky.
Smart-blur filter.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Big...Huge....Brains!
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
You're probably thinking of the CPPA (or is it the COPPA, I forget). You can find an analysis of the law and the Supreme Court's interpretation of it in Ashcroft v. Free Speech, 535 US 234.
In essence, the Court's ruling hinged on prior cases defining obscenity (and protecting pornography), and outlawing child pornography.
In NY v. Ferber, the Supreme Court said that child porn could be outlawed because of the harm to the child.
In Miller, the Supreme Court defined the test to determine whether speech was obscene such that it was not entitled to first amendment protections.
In Ashcroft, the Supreme Court held that virtual child pornography didn't fall within the Ferber exception because there was no harm to a real child. Therefore any attempt to ban it required application of the Miller test (a very high standard).
--AC
Real humans don't have such perfect symetry.
I suspect there's a lot more to it than that. Artists know that people are not perfectly symmetrical, and there's no reason why digital artists wouldn't already be making their characters intentionally asymmetrical.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
I'd expect that a walking corpse would be just fine for the next Resident Evil game. uuuuuuummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm brains!
Give them better facial quirks. If you see a CG animated character and his traits do not follow what he is trying to convey, he seems less human. I frown when i question something, i smile when i'm happy, i push back my lips when i'm wondering about something.
Without that, they feel artificial. I think a good CG character i didn't notice too much because they exagerated his facial traits was "Charming" in Shrek. The fact they made it so caricatural was, ironically, what made him seem more real.
That 1% missing from the "Valley" is attainable, but people are reluctant to bridge the gap (not to mention we don't have the power... yet) because it would make them too real.
Maybe it's a deep down, subsconscious fear that machines will one day be indistiguishable from real humans and cause problems. Think Terminator.
Trolls dont like to be Flamebait, because they burn so well. Protect our Troll heritage!
The article seems to point towards the conclusion that as the graphics become more and more refined, the issue becomes one of animation; The more a polygonal face resembles reality, the more we expect it to move realistically, and yet at the same time there are many more vertices to move around in many more directions.
At the core of the issue is that graphics by nature are an intermediary art form; the artist manipulates a medium, and the audience sees the final product, created over many hours of work and to the artists' satisfaction (Or the insistence of the one paying the artists.)
Animation of the human form extends from this familiar territory into that of performance art, where the medium is the artist's body, and the audience sees the result of many hours of practice and performance.
We expect cartoons, even realistic ones, to have at least some exaggeration in motion, if not form. Until recently computer graphcis fell into this category and thus our minds allowed them to bend the rules, but that time has passed. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is an example of this, however I think that the animation issues present in the movie are resulting more from financial and time crunnches than a lack of understanding and expertise on the part of the artists.
Not only are animators responsible for believable body physics, but now they must produce realistic facial expressions and body nuances, because the brains of those watching are identifying the characters onscreen as human in appearancee, but not in motion, and that descrepancy can only be remedied by the puppeteers commanding ten thousand strings.
I expect lawyers to argue that virtual child porn actually protects children, since it dilutes the supply and so decreases the demand for the actual, exploitative child porn. I'd honestly feel weird about virtual child porn sites, but if I were a judge, I can't imagine finding anything unconstitutional about it. If we start banning artistic creations (books, drawings, etc) we wouldn't be setting a very good example for the world.
I wish I could mod in this thread, thanks for the good info!
I think that's a fair assessment, although Congress has been working on a new statute to save the virtual child pornography provisions of the COPPA.
The primary arguments advanced by the Government in favor of the law were that:
1) VCP is indistinguishable from real Child Porn. Therefore prosecutions for possession of real child porn were nearly impossible to win.
2) VCP whets the appetite of pedophiles, so its very existence was a danger to children.
--AC
In the theater there is a concept known as "suspension of disbelief."
Yeah, that's what they always call it, but that's hardly what it is. I guess nobody stops disbeleving in the reality of the scene, what they do is imagine. Just as Shakespeare said, "make imaginary puissance". It's not 'suspension of disbelief', it's 'engaging the imagination'.
Has anyone here tried creating a 3D model of themselves with realistic texture maps? I started on such a project a few weeks ago and finally got some renderings made... and for the most part, I agree with the creepiness factor this article mentions. It just feels... "wrong" somehow.
I don't think it's quite so bad when you don't personally know the character, but you really notice it on faces/bodies you're used to seeing on a regular basis in real life.
Seriously though, I do recommend those of you with any 3D artistic talent take a moment to try modelling one's own body or head... it's a totally surreal experience playing around with what is esscentially an electronic version of your own corpse.
8==8 Bones 8==8
Yeah, I saw that, it was a great documentary. Fascinating. As I recall it went on to show an example of the other extreme: a white woman who was raped by a black man, and later swore in court that she recognised the attacker -- actually she wrongly identified someone else who happened to have the same skin colour; after about ten years in jail, they were able to do DNA testing and the poor guy was finally released.
She was horrified of course, that she had made such a mistake. But she had honestly believed she was right in her testimony. They put up photos of the two men (the real rapist and the unfortunate guy she 'identified'). They didn't look even vaguely similar to me. But apparently this woman had very little contact with black people in her daily life; and to her, these two guys looked sufficiently alike for her to mix the one up with the other.
I'm not trying to make a point about attitudes to race here. The interesting thing in this for me was it seems to confirm a vague, unscientific theory I've had for some time: that we recognise people's faces by ways in which they differ from some prototypical 'neutral' or generic human face. So our recognition-pattern for someone could maybe be represented in the brain by a series of specific variations (wider-than-average eyes, more-feminine-than-gender-neutral hips); kind of like how CVS stores diffs between versions rather than storing a full copy of every version.
So in this woman's case, black men in general are all so far from her mental prototype of a 'regular' person that the differences are too marked in one direction -- the racial differences in features, etc -- that more subtle variations that allow us to differentiate between people were lost. You hear examples of this all the time when people come into contact with new ethnic groups: "All these Asians look the same" etc... until of course they get to know a few people from that group, their mental prototype adapts to cope with the new data. I remember my father, soon after arriving in the UK from Bangladesh, often mixing people up, even those that looked very different: "These white people all look alike" he would joke. I wonder, is there a proper scientific theory that explores this idea with some academic rigour? Anyone? I'd like to read about it and see if I'm right...
[ UNSIGNED NOT NULL ]
It's possible to render extremely life-like human forms and motion well enough that nobody could tell the difference. It's definately an imperfect science, but it's doable IMO. More advanced physics models and improvements in modelling and motion capture technologies are needed, but it's very much an art and will depend on a few really talented people to pull off. There will always be crappy examples of artificial life, just as there will always be crappy art.
TallGreen CMS hosting
Interesting read. I guess this might be a reason for the current resurgence of interest in 'retro' games .. after the initial novelty of 3D wore off, a lot of people realised they preferred the simplicity of the older, less realistic games; since they were less lifelike, the brain is perhaps more inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt and suspend disbelief, rather than being like "Look at that sprite walking, that's ridiculous, no one walks like that".
This is also perhaps another reason people didn't buy into a full CGI film like Final Fantasy, whereas, for instance, Gollum from the Lord of the Rings movies is a huge success: he's sufficiently far removed from a real human that, although a creepy character, doesn't have the shudder-factor of the almost-human.
Actually this macabre effect can work positively too. I remember, in the days when I would waste countless hours playing a certain popular 3D shooting game in head-to-head mode, the faces of the characters (including my friends' avatars that I was trying to kill) would have that same uncanny almost-human look about them. I think the loathing I felt towards these creatures made me play the game better.
[ UNSIGNED NOT NULL ]
" Actually, a ``matte'' texture should be a lot less computationally expensive."
A shiny surface is just a reflection of it's surroundings bent around the surface with adjustments to color. If you use 3z algorithm to extract the context data, you can render the shiny object (which is just a mirror of its surroundings) in Olog(1/2n) time. Don't be such an ass.
I think most folks online don't appreciate it either when other players start camping.
It's actually "The Spirits Within". And I saw it and enjoyed it (yeah, I know...), but one mistake they made that made the movie feel way too surreal was motion blur - way, way too much of it. To very unnatural levels. 3D FPS games and roller coasters don't make me motion sick, but watching that movie, that's what motion sickness has got to feel like.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
...should be modded "funny."
The life-like humans in "Polar Express" are clearly in the "uncanny valley." It's bizarre to witness waiters on the train doing exuberant Broadway musical dance routines with totally non-exuberant expressions on their faces.
I suspect this is why "Shrek" did better at the box office than the Final Fantasy movie. Not just that Shrek looked more cartoony than Aki did, but also that he had so much wider a range of expression.
Try this experiment: List your favorite characters in the FF movie in order. Then go back and watch carefully. I think you'll find that the higher they appear on your list, the greater variety of facial expressions they have. I know this works for my list.
Unfortunately the villain had the most, while the top members of the hero-team had the fewest. Aki had two: stunned surprise and determined perseverence.
Shrek beat that in any five seconds he was on screen.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
In film, however. .
The whole idea is to 'unlink', so to speak, and merge your psyche with the story reality. That expression people get when listening to a good story-teller is evidence of this effect.
Creepy looking fake people makes for cruddy stories. Somehow, even the garbage bag aliens on Dr. Who were far easier to make-believe with, (probably because the special effects were so easy to see through), than some of today's high end computer animated stuff. Trying to be real but failing really knocks one out of the story reality. (Perhaps a handful of pain killers would help.)
"Emperor's New Groove" had no such pretensions, and it worked perfectly as a result.
Personal note: I felt very weird about, "Shrek", and so far as I can tell, I'm pretty much alone on this. --The whole thing looked like a computer game cut-scene and the messages about physical beauty seemed very weird. Short people are to be laughed at, the black guy is a donkey, (I wonder if the reference to the old southern term was unintentional. . ?), and I know several women who, barring the ears and green skin, look a lot like the female Troll.
Just seemed like a film to feel bad to. But I'm still processing that one.
-FL
In my mind, it's mainly due to the limitations humans are bound by. Yeah I can't really see the point behind fully done humans like in Final Fantasy: Spirits Within, but CG stuff like some parts of LOTR or the matrix, its because human actors are limited by real world physics, computer animation isn't. You can do amazing martial arts moves or whatever you could dream of with CGI. Yeah my two examples both used human actors, but they had CGI modified stuff. So I guess I didn't answer your question at all heh.
One thing I noticed straight off when watching AI (maybe because I'm an animator) was that it was easy to distinguish the robots from the humans - even little David, the robot boy who wants to be real:
None of the robots ever blinks their eyes.
Any movie ever where "Hacking" has been represented by a progress bar
I spat shit out of my cornhole when I read your comment. Don't you feel like a more whole person knowing this?
Delos: Have we got a vacation for you!
It's called The Uncanny Valley. Things that are /real close/ to human, but not, are really creepy. Things that are easily personified, but clearly not human, are not creepy.
Health is simply dying at the slowest rate possible.
Most god-games suck.
Most RTS games suck.
Most text-adventure games suck.
Most RPGs suck.
Now that that's out of the way, I'm going to talk Quake. That is, Quake the First, a love of mine, and I think a game that's never really been equalled (although Quake II and III both look better, and have their own charms).
The thing about Quake was that it was full of sudden action. No matter where you were, you always had to be on your toes. There might be an ogre around the corner, or there might not be. No matter what, though, anything that happened - happened really quickly.
The ultra-creepy soundtrack by NIN really played into this feeling. You play Quake for a couple hours, and it draws you in.
Sure, most of the AI was pretty dumb. But partly that was because of choices the designers made. When given a choice between a careful AI that would cleverly outmaneuver you, only attacking when it was good and ready, and one that would suddenly pop up and be right in your face at its first opportunity, they always went for the in your face option.
The only real complaint I had was on the range of the monsters. They didn't get around well enough, which makes them too predictable now for me to replay it anymore. But oh well.
Quake II's AI is smarter, and waits until it's got you before beginning to really attack. But the music sucks, and it's lost a lot of the suddenness in favour of these wide-open spaces. Quake III has too many wide-open spaces as well, and besides is really a deathmatch game, so not easily comparable. Although Quake III's bots are acceptably aggressive, more like Quake I.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
Good article about the "uncanny valley" (the last 1% on the road to realism where the results drop off sharply and the characters suddenly start looking freaky, rather than more lifelike).
I'm more and more impressed by the CGI films coming out from Pixar and DreamWorks (Shrek, Antz, Toy Story, Finding Nemo, etc.). There's an evolution from toys (machines), to insects, to animals, and now more and more humanoid characters. I'm have always assume that this trend toward better and better realism would continue, maybe even to the point that actors would become obsolete/optional within the foreseeable future.
In film, I think they use a lot of "biological models" (mechanical models of bones, muscles, skin, etc.) to produce the expressions and the positions of the characters, and the results seem pretty good. I assume that this is not done in games, but I could be wrong (does anybody know?).
Do any games use biological models to produce the characters in real-time, or do they use a simpler, less CPU-intensive approach?
"Anybody can change the world, but most people probably shouldn't." -- Marge Simpson
I can't swear to it, not being in such a business myself, but I remember it being widely reported that in the 3rd Matrix Movie (Revolutions?), the method they use to hack into the Electricity company is a legit method/exploit.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
I was impressed.
Shinsengumi de gozaru