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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."
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
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.
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)
This actually brings up a good point. Games like Postal 2 are full of brutal and bloody violence. In the article, Clive Thompson says the characters in games look like "animated corpse(s)." I for one would rather be brutally killing things that may try to be realistic, but are obviously not, than ones that actually come closer to fooling us into believing they're human.
Not more than you need, just more than you want
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
Interesting that you bring up Aki. I have a silk screened wall hanging of the same image that a friend picked up at E3 several years ago. My feeling about the Final Fantasy movie was that the characters were amazingly life like, *until* they started talking. 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. No light in their eyes, or any of the other subtle facial clues we look for when talking to someone. Beautiful when rendered static, but wrong and a bit creepy when in action.
I wonder if WETA tried to re-model Gollum as a human how realistic it would be. The technology has clearly advanced to the point where they can pick up many of those subtle clues, but since it was still non-human, I wonder how much of that is our projection of emotion into it.
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 find this to be a good example of being "nearly-there".
Didn't Freud talk about this in his examination of the unheimlich? We're freaked out by stuff thats almost-but-not-quite human.
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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 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.
The way I remember it is that they said she looked so realistic she looked out-of-place in contrast to the intentionally cartoony/exaggerated sets and other characters.
No, the point is that when you start to make a robot look human, your brain thinks "ah, that's a cute robot!", but when you make a robot look ALOT like a human your brain starts thinking "damn, that's a fucked up human".
"but really, are very realistic paintings of people creepy?"
Never seen a movie with a picture with cut out eyes so people can "spy" on people in the room? Yes, that looks creepy.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
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.
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
C3P0, now that you mention it, has those huge perplexed-looking eyes. A totally neutral robot face DOES look a tiny bit creepy and corpselike. C3P0 looks submissive and nonthreatening, his facial expression works for almost every state of emotion he expresses (also a tribute to Anthony Daniels' ability to make anything in the script sound like it goes with that expression).
Are we really to the point where we begin to talk about human-machine interfaces in terms of RACIAL relations? "Nonthreatening", where have you heard that before?
Still, if C3P0 was a PERFECTLY human-looking android, that same wide-open look would creep you the fuck out, like someone walking around with no eyelids.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
Why is this important? well because with the technique, you track the motion of the bodymass of the actor, along with his skeletons, you don't track the motion of the texture of the human. Our minds are used to tracking the motions of even the blood inside a moving human body, to identify intent as well as capacity to threaten, so even seeing the sway of the body hairs of an opponent can contribute or detract from realism. That noone made a motion capture suit that can track that much detail(indeed most motion-capture suit obfuscate some of those, as they enclose the human in question, not even allowing sweat to escape) means that all motion-tracked(my word, you are free to trade me a better one) games will lack those telltales as muscles shifting, lipid flow, blood derivation or sweat traces, and those are all used by our instinctive mind as proof of "real human threat, approach with caution" or "woohoo matable member of the opposite sex, approach with caution if weapon is in view, otherwise, strut a bit" as opposed to "something fishy, alert alert alert". The last case has a bad effect in games because:
it prevents suspension of disbelief by engaging suspicion reflex
it leaves the primitive brain without a preprogrammed response, which makes the gamer somewhat uncomfortable (it's going improv without a script after all)
our higher brain functions may be unaffected, but they are pretty far from our pleasure centers, so pleasing the higher brain functions exclusively doesn't work as well as exciting the higher brain functions and eliciting survival/reproduction/lower brain reflexes or pleasure
As for the roomba, anyone notice how most cars also end up having super-deformed puppy faces on them? We thrive on the familiar, so using pet shapes, which are familiar and reassuring, works better than super-futuristic shapes, which is why the 60's fashion of "spaceclothes" never caught on since.
The human brain is the best pattern recongition mechanism every discovered. There is nothing remotely upon our technological horizon that can mimic or replace the pattern recognition ability that is inherent in advanced mammals. There's a level of function that we understand abstractly, but have no working model for.
In these posts there's been alot of discussion about symmetry and its associations with beauty, but I think that simplifies things too much. I like to look at inverse reactions to beauty...horror. A misshappen human figure we natural recoil against. Its probably an biological protocol that evolved to have us avoid diseased members of our species that are not viable partners for procreation.
Think of the grotesequely repulsive reactions you have.
1. Burn victims and disfiguring diseases like leoprosy or facial cancers (victims of which who deserve tremendous sympathy and support)...
2. Misproportinate artistic representation (think "Black Hole Sun" video)...
3. Botched or excessive body manipulation (e.g. excessive weightlighting, or breast impants/face lifts). Think Michael Jackson.
There was a pastiche diagram I once saw, comprised of pictures of reaslitic human female body parts compiled together in the proportions of Barbie. It was so creepy i have shivers up and down my spine.
I am hoping that HDTV and its realism will have a calming effect on our air brushed, perfectionist, image-perfect culture. I think women have a much more difficult time with body image due to our media than men (although Calvin Klein has been trying to change this for years, fark you CK). Once people realise how heavily made up Catherine-Zeta Jones is, or how Jennifer Aniston always has a soft lense used, maybe people will be more comfortable with their own selves.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
Pretty nice! It looks like synthetic child porn is very close. 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.
Alias has a prett neat quiz bettween real pictures and computer generated ones. If you've never seen it it's availible here. I first recall seing it more than a year ago, so it's not exactly still state of the art, but I don't think I did that well on the quiz.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
To some extent what you say is true. But as 3d character animator... I can with out a doubt say Humans are harder to animate :)
:) ANYTHING off, looks off. that includes skin sliding, muscle movement, skin tranlucency, skin texture, material, reflections, hair on the head and the body... Walk animations, any movement around the eyes where eye movement affects the skin and muscles around it so gently.
And the reason is... Your point
There is just so much to do when animating a human. If we're talking about the absolutely perfect ideal animated human... then we're talking about levels of detail like no other... Because of the very reason you point out.
So animating them is much harder... because people will notice the difference.
Animation is hard no matter what. A slight change of anything can evoke a mood or attitude that you dont want.
Animating humans IS HARD. In animation you judge the level of difficulty by what you can get away with... This is true. But animating a 3d snoopy, vs animating a 3d realistic human is so much harder because of the level of refinement, detail and what you can and cant get away with.
Snoopy can spin his ears like a helicopter and no one will question it.
When animating a human... If the ears dont move just right when they're required too... Does the character evoke a supid emotion? A state of dumbness? Shock? horror, cartoony? A human can go so wrong so easily when animating one.
Chuck Jones is considered one of the worlds BEST animation directors/animators...
He never animated a realistic 3d human... Could he have? Not without an army.
Its not a question of skill... its a question of detail and the work load.
Paintings are a bad example.
Life-like images are not exactly new. We're quite use to them because they do get so life-like.
The problem is entirely in MOVEMENT of those life-like objects. Eyes twitch or blink the wrong way, certain areas skin on the face move too little or too much as the lips move. The gait, or posture of the walking figure just doesn't look right.
We're so use to seeing humans that we never pick up on these subtle things that we instantly recognize as "human".
When you're presenting an animated or toon-ish character, you're mind easily accepts it because you understand it's a parody of a real object.
When presented with life-like objects, you're mind is trying to accept them, not as parody, but as the real thing. This touches completely different areas of the brain. An area use to seeing ONLY humans. Now something that doesn't act human is trying to be passed off to this area of the brain. It instantly says "no ufcking way" and thus.. we get all those creepy feelings because we've got no idea how to react. Up until this point, we hadn't been subjected to non-human objects trying to be passed off as human. That area of the brain has no clue how to react.
* 'area of brain' is not meant as a physical area. i do not claim to be a brain-tologist. hah.
The answer to your gollum question...
Weta did have digital doubles for their actors. Of course they wouldnt have the level of detail that Gollum requires for upclose acting. But from a far, even Legolas and the other digital doubles looked fake due to their actions.
Legolas tackling that elephant creature... it just doesnt move or look real in any manner at all. Its unbeleivable from just about every angle and to top it off, the animation wasnt natural.
Even Spider-man who is basically a human form without the expressive face... was animated poorly in spider-man 1.
Now take Jackie Chan from 94 and earlier... (when he could move) There is a real human being doing amazing things. Infact hes surrounded by a whole team of human beings doing amazing, REAL stunts and fight scenes.
Occasionally they'll use a wire here and there for effect in Jackie's movies and yet its still beleivable, and its strengthed by the fact taht you actually beleive that is Jackie doing all of those things.
Its almost a magic trick... You're expecting a real person to do these things, then they do it, and wow.. amazing. What you missed is one of the shots had a stuntman doubling Jackie. You missed it because 95$ of the films stunts was infact Jackie.
Slide of hand. Movies have always been about tricks, the biggest factor is.. what can we do to get your mind willing and able to accept the very thing we want you to beleive.
I don't know about the other guy, but I used to be a paramedic. This causes problems when I go to movies or watch TV. The blood and gore almost always looks fake and I start this bizarre giggling.
Needless to say, I did not go to see "The Passion of the Christ."
This sig seemed like a good idea at the time....
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
It doesn't take a FPS to do that. Before we had computer graphics, Generals would act out upcoming battles on massive game tables, using chance to simulate complex components of battle. Both sides in WWII used this technique with pretty good success. Well, when they used it. The Nazis stopped using simulations when Hitler got it in his head that he was some sort of Napolean.
In the Art of War, Sun Tsu writes: Now the general who wins a battle makes many calculations in his temple ere the battle is fought. The general who loses a battle makes but few calculations beforehand. Thus do many calculations lead to victory, and few calculations to defeat, how much more no calculation at all!
Not exactly on topic...
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
that's a good point.
And precisely what the article says.
i think my main issue with the article is that it claims that we think of animations/robots that are less human-looking as more human, when there is no evidence to support that idea.
There's plenty of evidence to support exactly what the article says. Whether it says what you're saying here depends on what you mean by "more human". We're certainly not fooled into thinking something is human by a lack of realistic details. On the other hand, we're less distracted by the inhumanity of something when it has less detail. We're not constantly being reminded "it's not human" because our brains don't make an issue out of it. Perhaps "more life-like" would be a better term. We more easily project into something we see as living than into something inanimate (it's more easy to anthropomorphize a car than a picnic table, for example -- easier still to anthropomorphize the pet dog). My pet cat seems "more human" in this sense than the animated characters in a modern video game. And, indeed, she is "more human". At least she's a warm-blooded mammal rather than a pattern of dots on a CRT. Anything that an animated character does to draw my attention to the fact that it's not flesh and blood drags me away from the illusion.
The more details you throw in, unless you get them precisely perfect, the more opportunities you get to spoil the illusion. I've seen perfectly realistic seeming characters in a game suddenly become jokes when they start walking in some scene. Real people can walk, so a sprite that can walk is more realistic than one that stands perfectly still throughout a scene, right? Technically, yes, this is true, but if it hadn't started walking, I wouldn't have been suddently and jarringly reminded of how unreal it actually is. I was buying it until it started walking.
The most realistic, more believable, "most human" characters I've seen were in books, and they were nothing but words on paper. They seem a lot less real when you can recognize them as Brad Pitt on the screen. Am I saying words on paper are "more human" than Brad Pitt? Well, in the sense of "more human" that this article is talking about, yes, precisely.
It boils down to this -- if your brain is better at filling in the details than the animators, the animation will be less jarring with less detail, and the less often you are jarred by the animation, the less often the illusion is spoiled. OTOH, if the animators can capture detail better than your brain and recall every last detail of a thing, then the reverse will be true, and you'll actually appreciate the quality of the animation. In our minds, we may have only a sketchy idea of what a picnic table looks like, so a fine bit of texturing and bump-mapping will knock our socks off with it's realism. But our minds are extremely well tuned for noticing details about human beings, so the same quality of animation that seems so damned real for the picnic table is jarringly unrealistic for the character.
And the more unrealistic detail you throw in, the more often you jar the viewer's senses. More (in quantity) accurate details will improve the realism. More (in quantity) inaccurate details will take away from ther realism. If you agree with these two statements, it follows that an animation with less detail, assuming the missing details would have been inaccurate, is "more human" than the one with more (but inaccurate) details. Adding inaccurate details, whether it's adding eyebrows that don't move properly or adding extra arms, doing this makes something seem less human, not more. Both leaving off the eyebrows and leaving off the extra arms will make the character seem more human, and for the same reason. However, if you're really good at drawing and animating arms, the character will the extra arms will seem more lifelike and be easier to swallow...
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
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.
This should get it's own Slashdot article: do they ever get ANYTHING right in the movies? I may have to see if it's ever been done on Slashdot....
This sig seemed like a good idea at the time....
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.
I've noticed that during sporting events filmed in HD, that the closeups of the athletes (who I'm pretty sure do not wear makeup) look perfectly normal. I don't know whether this is because of conditioning (athletes aren't expected to look like actors), the lighting, the sweat, or what. However, when viewing a show in HD that has also been filmed in SD, the makeup on the actors/actresses looks horrible and overdone. It's almost as if HD requires actors to not use makeup in order to appear normal, whereas the lower SD resolution required lots of makeup to achieve the "normal" look.
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*
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