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."

Comments

Curve

[mfh]

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?

Re:Curve

[Jane_Dozey]

No, you're right. Just look at tetris (people are STILL playing tetris and it's clones). I think the problems come in when a game is trying to look all realistic and slick but doesn't pull it off very well. Games that are consistant and arn't meant to look realistic by design can still be great games and don't suffer for their lack of shiny graphics.

Re:Curve

[Phisbut]

The worst problems with games these days is that game designers rely on high-quality graphics to appeal to the player, and they practically don't innovate in terms of gameplay.

The best of games have an interresting gameplay, not superb graphics. Just look at the whole series of Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six... they got nice graphics and all, but when you played a shooter once, you played them all. Or even FarCry... how different is that from Doom or Quake or Half-Life with super high-res graphics (that require a video card more powerful than anything actually on the market...).

Games like Tetris, Super Mario Bros. 3, Final Fantasy and The Sims are superbly good because they innovated in terms of gameplay, not because they have nice graphics.

Designers are supposed to be artists, not administrators. Right now, they see a genre (say... FPS) and think "I'm gonna make an FPS game that looks so realistic (either graphics or physics or both) that it's gonna be very popular". That is in fact the administrator's point of view. The real Artist should rather think "What hasn't been done yet that would totally appeal to the players?"

Until that day comes, we'll be stuck with games you'll buy for $50 and then get bored after a week.

Re:Curve

[The Evil Couch]

when you played a shooter once, you played them all.

well, that's not really fair. while it's true that games fall into patterns, it wasn't originally because of any foolish marketing scheme, it was because they were valid platforms to progress from.

take id, for example. they progressed from a cartoony shooter (Wolf3D) to a dark atomosphere (Doom) to an arcade team-combat game (Quake 3 Team arena). they vary pretty widely and give a good deal to the genre.

it's the same with any other genre, really. you have some games that innovate and are forever benchmarks. you have other games that are extentions of those. and you have those that are cheap imitations, hungry for the bucks.

Umm. They aren't *that* realistic.

[untaken_name]

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.

Re:Umm. They aren't *that* realistic.

[surreal-maitland]

exactly. they even say that eyes and mouths don't move correctly when the characters speak. the article is very self-contradictory in the sense that it continues to claim that as graphics get more humanlike, they get more creepy, but the creepiness is due to the differences, not the similarities.

but really, are very realistic paintings of people creepy? (and paintings as realistic as photographs *do* exist) no! why? because they're *realistic*.

oh, and the author thinks his roomba is cute because it acts sort of like a *pet*. a very stupid and clean pet, but a pet, not a human.

Re:Umm. They aren't *that* realistic.

[haystor]

That's kind of the point. As they become more realistically human, they require a higher standard for the brain to accept them. The fact is, humans aren't any harder to animate but the brain is much better at noticing the differences. Spaceships look good because the brain doesn't intrinsically recognize the proper shape for a spacehip.

I'm sure that to pilots a lot of the plane animations in Pearl Harbor looked just wrong. If someone drew a dragon with the ears tapered back along the top of the head instead of out to the side would you immediately notice that as wrong? Now draw a human and move any feature around by half and inch and see what a difference it makes.

Re:Umm. They aren't *that* realistic.

[MyHair]

but the creepiness is due to the differences, not the similarities

I haven't RTFA, and I took the quote out of context, but that's par for the course.

Actually I think this similarities make the differences more noticable. It's like if you play two musical notes together, but one is a half-note out of tune it sounds incredibly awful...way more awful than if the notes were a quarter-octive apart and one was out of tune by a half note. Or if you're wearing a red shirt and red pants, but they aren't quite the same color red it's very distracting and annoying.

I think as the overall effect looks more realistic the tiny differences sour the effect more than they normally would because instead of our imagination filling in the gaps our perceptions keep warning us something ain't right.

But I'm probably just nitpicking semantics....

Re:Umm. They aren't *that* realistic.

[Have Blue]

What seems to be going on is that as you progress from "does not look like a human" to "looks like a human" you have to pass through a "looks like a human corpse" region. The image of the face is perfect, but all sorts of subtle motions and colors are simply not present, a description which also fits the recently deceased to a T. We are naturally repelled by corpses, so the same reflex is triggered.

In movies too

[Jonny_eh]

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!

What about art?

[Lispy]

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.

Yet More Predictions about What Computers Can't Do

[Badam]

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?

Dunno

[Dark Lord Seth]

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...

Speilberg's AI would happen?

[GPLDAN]

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.

Re:I don't care how realistic the figures look...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Sad case

[thpdg]

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!

Re:Americas Army

[Dun Malg]

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.

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.

Re:examples?

[pomakis]

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.

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.

Robophobia

[sakusha]

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.

Wow

[bogie]

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.

Re:I don't care how realistic the figures look...

[chris_mahan]

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.

You weren't nitpicking

[*weasel]

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.

Re:You weren't nitpicking

[*weasel]

lets go back to the alegory of the den
Is that related to Plato's Allegory of the Cave? ;)
I'll assume its the same; you can correct me if I'm wrong in that.

There are going to be people whose primary experience is through the neural tap, and who only ever see the incomplete approximations that computers can produce.
Primary experience is one thing, 'only ever' is quite another. If a person were to be born and raised with a nueral tap presenting an 'incomplete' version of reality, then arguably they would be fine with their 'incomplete' reality. That however would be a minor point, as without stimulation of the physical eyes, the retina simply won't attach to the optic nerve. People who 'grow up' with a neural tap would be blind if they were unplugged.

If a person does grow up and learn to see with their eyes, then even if it isn't the primary method of sensation, the incomplete reality will still be subject to the uncanny valley.

Those growing up knowing /only/ the feed from their neural tap might well perfectly accept their incomplete reality. Arguably, hardware revisions that increase resolution and accuracy would also be acceptable to them. In a nutshell, that's how perfectly normal children go through the process of learning to see: a slow refinement of their visual resolution. I think it's only the step backwards in delivery that causes a problem.

Just look what Television has done to the art of communication...
I think it may be a bit early to wade into this side of the pool. I believe the jury on ADD and entertainment is still out.

I'm often called on cast a technical eye on a report or communication that was prepared by a layman. Inevitably that document includes an comment or extrapolation that, while in everyday experience is accurate, it only holds under a controlled set of circumstances.
I'm missing the relevance here. It seems as if you are simply restating that laymen are incompletely trained. Isn't that the definition of being a layperson? And how does this relate to the human revulsion toward the almost-real?

Re:I don't care how realistic the figures look...

[EvilTwinSkippy]

My brother used to be Opfor at Fort Irwin. Yes, the real Opfor at the real Fort Irwin. They used to be the Soviets, today they are the Krasnovians.

Regardless of how "realistic" the graphics look, combat simulators can't simulate:

• Lack of sleep.
• Equipment Failure. (M16's really don't like sand.)
• Boredom. (For most of the battle, you are just sitting there.)
• Running around in chem suits under a desert sun.

Re:I don't care how realistic the figures look...

[Austerity Empowers]

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.

Re:I don't care how realistic the figures look...

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Now you know what it's like for a computer Guru to sit through a spy movie.

"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.

Re:Americas Army

[Dr. Evil]

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.

Re:examples?

[belloc]

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

Re:I don't care how realistic the figures look...

[JudgeFurious]

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.