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Leaping the Uncanny Valley
reachums submits this glance at "the newest level of computer animation," intended to get past the paradoxical "uncanny valley" — that is, the way animated humans actually can appear jarring as the animation gets hyper-realistic. "This short video gives us a glimpse of what we can hope to see in the future of computer games and movies. Emily is not a real actress, but she looks like a real person, something we haven't truly seen before in computer animation."
First off, they failed at getting passed the "uncanny valley". That video is still creepy looking.
Second, this isn't computer animation. It's just video processing. If you still need to do high resolution motion capture to produce your images, you haven't replaced the actor. You've merely edited their appearance in the performance. They didn't even bother to go so far as to take the captured motion and paste key bits of it together into the speech. They just had her sit there and say the whole thing, then "rendered" it.
Lame.
Be sure to tick the 'Watch in high quality' when the video opens (anyone knows a way to do that automatically in a link?)
Add '&fmt=6' after the link. Like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLiX5d3rC6o&fmt=6
That's what I thought as well until I saw it in higher quality.
A higher quality version of the video can be found here.
It's not perfect, but it certainly is climbing high up out of the uncanny valley to say the least.
I think you misunderstand the uncanny valley concept. In fact, your entire rebuttal is mostly a restatement of the concept itself.
The point is the more realistic something is, the more disturbing any 'defects' in it's simulation are. Stuffed animals don't breath, they don't move, they don't growl. Neither do paintings. These things may be realistic in the sense that they portray a snapshot of the thing they are based on, but they don't come anywhere close actually convincing you that they ARE the thing they were based on. I don't know of anyone who would mistake a stuffed bob cat sitting in someone's den or a museum as the real thing for more than a few seconds. Likewise, people pretty much know when they are looking at a painting or even a photo.
All of those things are on the 'safe' side of the valley. The problem comes when you start getting things that move, sound, and mostly act as if they are alive but clearly aren't. Your actor with the no-spill glass would be in the valley, so to would be photorealistic computer models that didn't have facial expressions when they spoke (ala FF).
And for the record, while the uncanny valley was popularized by talking about computer generated graphics, it was actually coined by a roboticst back in the 70's, and was based on an idea first presented by Freud in the 1910's.
The person in the video is Emily O'Brien a professional actress. You can find a much better video of Image Metric's work on this page of her website