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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.
This is very true. Ventriloquist dummies are the worst.
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/
That is a real person. That model would have been body scanned.
What makes body scanned CG characters so different to a photo of someone?
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.
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?
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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 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.
When games finally cross the final borders into photorealism, it will become interesting to gauge the publics reaction to games that become truly realistic in their depiction of violence and death.
Americas Army will get away with this under the banner of the "fight for americas omnipotent and brave armed forces and kill a few towelheads" banner. But when the next generation Grand Theft Autos and Manhunts allow the gamer a criminal/malevolent experience that is hard to differentiate from reality, will it merely be an act of harmless escapism, or something entirely more desensitising?
It would only take one high-profile school shooting or kidnap/murder/suicide to get the tabloid media attacking the games industry with a ferocity unseen since the days of the staggeringly shit Mortal Kombat.
This would not be so funny if you have actually ever been in combat and seen just this thing happen. I've seen my share of combat, but stuff like this is disturbing as Hell and sticks with you for the rest of your life. In computer games, you are looking at vectors, wire frames, Gourard shading etc...etc...etc..., but the real life that you are "simulating" in games is represented by brain tissue, blood and human lives.
Semper Fi
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."
That's one thing I've always liked about America's Army. The developers are constantly pushing to move the game towards realism. It keeps away the "haha! you sux0rz, you n00b!" bunnyhopping jerkweeds you find in games like CounterStrike. Usually I can't play for more than about 45 minutes before I need to go do something else less stressful. This is as it should be because, ultimately, what they're simulating isn't a game. I think it's been an instructive tool for showing some of these kids that it isn't like it is in movies.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
I think that creating a still image realistic enough to fool the human brain is a lot easier than creating an animated image realistic enough to fool the human brain. The article's statement that "Neuroscientists argue that our brains have evolved specific mechanisms for face recognition, because being able to recognize something 'wrong' in someone else's face has long been crucial to survival" is a gross understatement. A considerably large amount of the brain is specifically dedicated to recognizing facial expressions. This includes all of the subtle movements that are involved in facial expressions. It's these subtle movements that are very difficult to artificially animate accurately enough to fool the human brain. That's why the article uses the term "animated corpse". Even something as 'trivial' as a slightly unnatural pertubation of one small cheeckbone twitch is enough to tell the human brain that something is wrong.
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.
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?
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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.
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
Human skin is transparent, blotchy, an has many layers that move independently. It folds along creases, and bunches while it moves. (No matter how fat or thin you are.) All that makes it messy for artists to model us, which is where artistic ideals come from.
The bugger with computers is that they do the ideal perfectly. The problem is that the ideal is no reflection of reality.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Completely correct.
However, the notion is like this:
Man 1:
You see these little squarish symbols on the map there?
Man 2:
yes
Man 1:
They represent units. There are the infantry regiments and battalions, the field artillery here , the armored units over here, the mech inf behind.
Man 2:
I see.
Man 1:
We move them around, and gain terrain by pushing the enemy back.
Man 2:
Brilliant! Let's do it.
Now, that's abstracting the flesh and blood nature of the soldiers on the ground doing the moving around and the civilians getting caught in the middle.
When true-to-life realistic games come across, and you see the bodyparts flying around, it's a lot harder for joe public to say it's okay to lose a regiment on a "bad day".
So while psychologically it's harder to "see the white of their eyes", I think ultimatly it serves the soldiers all around the world that the public realize they are not just game pieces to be moved around.
I think also that it is better if 500,000 19 year olds get the "kill them" out of their systems by shooting virtual soldiers that respawn in 10 seconds than enlisting to go "kick some ass" overseas.
(to the great chagrin of recruiters everywhere)
Perhaps it would be good to set up netcafes in "hotspots" with free fps gaming like counterstrike, so that the locals can get their kicks instead of making roadside bombs.
I also noticed an interesting side effect. Any ill-conceived notion of invulnerability is shattered by playing those games, because you will be killed in the games, no matter how good you are. Everybody that plays those games know that the ones who rush the tunnels die first. And the lone sniper whose team has been wiped out can last a bit longer, but he gets killed too. Maybe not this round, but next.
The realism makes people realize that being gung-ho about fighting with guns makes you dead.
"Piter, too, is dead."
He obviously hadn't seen HD porn before writing that article. HD is porn the way it was meant to be seen I tell you what! Night Calls on Playboy HD is the best thing since, well, porn on VHS!
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?"
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
Eh, I don't feel so bad. Apparently the girl is so mentally imbalanced that she gets upset over a fake picture of a non-existant girl in a bikini. You're probably better off without a girl like that.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Regardless of how "realistic" the graphics look, combat simulators can't simulate:
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Somehow I read your post and believe the opposite. Games are ultimately designed for the player to win: be it by solving problem, developing spiderman twitch reflexes, etc. Winning or beating a level usually involves an ego massage along with it ("Excellent mighty warrior...") Second, no matter how realisitic a game ultimately looks, suspension of disbelief is voluntary subconcious submission to unreality, and only disturbed people actually think it's real. The rest of us know in our heart that our victory is hollow, but enjoy it for the challenge of it. Do you worry much about dying in a game? Not really, only if it sets you back somehow.
What Semper Fi above was alluding to is that "real life" is quite the opposite. You may not win, your entire purpose in life may be to be blown up. You may be the smartest, fastest and well equipped and STILL eat it. When you kill someone, he stays dead forever. When his brains are splattered on the wall, you are faced with the harsh reality that IT COULD HAVE BEEN YOU, and may yet be. Further your survival may have less to do with native instict & training than by sheer dumb luck.
The trouble is, until you're in one of these situations, I don't think anyone (myself included) really understands it. Games romanticize it, make it sexy etc. I doubt they are a deterrent to anything.
On the other hand I don't really believe many people join based on notions of heroics. I suspect the #1 driver is paying for college or more simply steady work & a familiar institutional atmosphere. During war-time it may be a different story, but then the country may need foolish people in search of glory to fill the ranks, and they will become heroes even if they die unromantically.
That, and the lousy story and dialog.
However, many action films are successful even with lousy story and dialog. And the action sequences in Final Fantasy were very good.
"I've crossed referenced [the subject's] credit card receipts and have pinpointed his location to..."
That's a neat trick, credit card processors take days to settle payments, and queries generally require a court order, and are generally historical in nature.
"We have a live satellite image of the location..."
Really? On a satellite that is travelling at 17,000 mph. Normally we are lucky to get a blurry snapshot, at best, every 90 minutes. More likely a snapshot every few days, owing the the orbital mechanics of spy satellites. Geo-stationary satellites are too far away to get a decent close-up from.
"I've cross referenced the FBI's database..."
Until recently the FBI's database was a green-screen application that would take days to search properly. Assuming what you were looking for was in it. And your search didn't require more than one word at a time.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Sounds like my undergraduate degree
No, no it doesn't. If you honestly think taking part in real, live wargames is like getting your undergraduate degree, you have no sense of perspective on the subject.
Running around in chem suits under a desert sun. - Trying sitting inside a small computer lab with no air conditioning in the middle of Summer
You don't honestly think sitting in a hot room in tee-shirt and shorts (or even collard shirt and jeans) is anything remotely like having a limited amount of oxygen, and no ability for the sweat sticking to your skin to evaporate, do you? At least you could wipe off your sweat.
For bonus points, try running for a couple of miles in that same chem suit, carrying 80 lbs of gear on your back. I was only in the Navy, so my worst experience with chem warfare training was turning off the air conditioning in the ship, feeling the tempature go up to 110 degrees (steel and aluminum tend to get hot when being hit by the mid-day sun in the Persian Gulf), and having to drink water through a straw in my gas mask. The Marines we dropped on the beach had it infinitely worse.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
I'm fucking married, AC. And I wouldn't have GOT married to anybody who was so insecure with her own body that I couldn't look at a picture of another girl without upsetting her sense of self.
Fidelity is one thing...but any girl who expects you to close your eyes to beauty is a succubus to be abandoned as soon as possible.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
The realism for me would be me sitting in the bushes thinking "Why can't we all just get along? This is so stupid, I'm going to be sent out to kill some guy because he's been sent out to kill me because somebody's F*ed up ideologies dictate that somebody else's F*ed up ideologies are F*ed up!"
Realistic? I've never played the game, but isn't the objective of most combat to not have a fair fight? In games, an unfair fight generally isn't fun.
Overwhelm your opponent, demoralize your opponent, and never, so to speak, put their back against the wall... you don't want to fight people who think/know they are fighting for their lives. Treat your enemy prisoners fairly and your enemy combatants will be making a daily decision as to whether or not to follow their leader. Of course your friendly combatants are making the same decision daily...
The objective of war is to change your opponent's mind.
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
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
Wasn't there some US law that was being considered about sexually explicit rendered pictures depicting children? Will there be laws that forbid you from drawing certain scenes? That would be weird, but we're living in weird times.
I hope you're not implying that we're "living in weird times" because our society doesn't think it's a good idea to depict sex with children, because that's how it sounds in the context of your message. In terms of these sorts of things (unconventional sexual behaviour) we're living in the most permissive western society in dozens of generations.
A hundred years ago, if you thought it might be fun to depict sex with children, people wouldn't have done anything quite as nice as to take away your working materials and send you away for a few months or years. You probably wouldn't have even made it to someplace quite as comfy as a court of law. There probably would have been a mob of people at your front door knocking each other over to be the one that got to string you up by your genitals in the town square.
Yes, we may feel that the government (or whoever) is watching us more closely in the past few years than it had in recent memory, but let's not blow things out of proportion, or forget what things were like in the past.
Belloc
I got more rhymes than Jamaica got Mangoes.
Ditto for anyone who's been in the army trying to watch a war movie. Rarely if ever does anything look real or act appropriately. People stay bunched together because they all need to be in the shot when in reality they would be much farther apart for example.
Soldiers in the movies generally don't behave much like their real world counterparts nor do their opponents.
Anyone remember "Red Dawn" where the RPG's looked like they were moving in slow motion along a wire? Most war movies to a pathetic job of portraying what real munitions look like in use.
Guys roaming around the jungles of Vietnam with modern versions of M-16 rifles in "Platoon". Once character named "Bunny" bit a beer can in half at one point and it was aluminum. I was too young for the Vietnam war and even I remember that before aluminum cans beer and soda came in steel cans with a stamped strip down the side (which I challenge anyone to casually bite through to impress their friends). Or the scene in "Full Metal Jacket" where Joker is walking through the barracks carrying a modern Mag-light.
One movie where the inconsistancies didn't bother me too bad was the Jason Patrick movie "The Beast" about a Russian tank crew lost in Afghanistan. It was filmed in Israel using a bunch of real Soviet hardware which I can only assume the Israeli army has piles of just sitting around from thumping thier Arab friends. Tanks firing looked like tanks firing. WP rounds looked like WP rounds. Houses didn't burst into flames (they were stone and mud huts) but rather shuddered and collapsed.
They rarely resorted to the cliche "Monster Fireball" effect and even the radio that the tank crewmen were listening to was labeled in Russian.
It's hard to find a realistic movie if you're in the field being shown. I imagine lawyers get a good laugh out of lawyer movies, cops chuckle at police movies, and doctors find medical dramas hard to watch.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
I was just talking about this yesterday. Someone raised up the often-cited "fact" that on average, people swallow six spiders per year while sleeping. Here's her question: how do you measure that?
If you see information and can't possibly imagine how it could have been gathered, it probably wasn't. It's just bullshit.
Also remember, 83% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
Sorry to be flaming , but what resolution does your tv use? doesn't the poeople on csi look real enough for you?, well it probably has something to do with you're telly ., hmmmm
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.
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