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
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..."
:-)
:-|
:-(
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.
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.
-ninjaneer
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 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
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?
Since America's Army is supposed to be at least partly a recruiting and pre-training tool, as a former medic, I say: GOOD. Anyone who wants a realistic combat experience in a video game ... should get exactly that.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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.
t
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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