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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."
There was much talk about the uncanny value when Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within came out after Square had promised for years that it would have realistic humans. A common criticism was that the human beings were real enough to inspire comfort for long enough that one would be then shaken by their lack of certain flexibility and the bloodlessness of their faces. Dr Aki was more creepy than sexy.
From what i understood, this is simply an easier kind of motion capture that works straight from video without the need for sensors etc. That's not the same as creative animation, you still need a real person talking and moving.
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...many flesh-and-blood actors I've seen.
In a discussion elsewhere, someone stated that the facial animation was good, but the body movement was unrealistic. Since the body movement was actually a live actor, I'd say that this was analogous to a passed Turing test -- an observer couldn't tell which parts were animated and which parts were human. (It's a weak analogy, of course, since there was no interaction.)
Just as synthesizers were the end of "real" musicians, photography was the end of "real" paintings, etc.
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The eyes look strange on their own. I can't quite put my finger on it, which I guess is part of why the uncanny valley is disturbing. But you're right, the blinks aren't quite right either.
Motion capture a face and rerender it from the same viewpoint as a camera used to capture the texture and you'll trivially get something almost indistinguishable from the original. It's only a valid test if you change something significant: move the camera, change the lighting, change the facial features or change the performance.
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I am amazed at the quality of this animation: Still, I could see there was -something- wrong with her, but could not put my finger on it. (this was of course also influenced since I -knew- she was fake before watching the vid).
Btw, here's a direct link to the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLiX5d3rC6o
Be sure to tick the 'Watch in high quality' when the video opens (anyone knows a way to do that automatically in a link?)
When you shoot a mime, do you use a silencer?
I'd say it's past the uncanny valley. That's not to say that I can't tell it's fake. She looks a little fake. Something is wrong-- her face is too still or something. But she doesn't look like a zombie. She's not distractingly creepy. That's all they're really shooting for at the moment, right?
I wonder if certain faces work better with this technology than others. Perhaps younger, smoother faces (like "Emily") work better than old, wrinkly faces, since they can get an accurate representation of skin texture without as much complexity.
Do stuffed animals instantly create a sense of revulsion? Not really else they wouldn't have been around for so long yet this is the ultimate uncanny valley item. As close to the living thing as you can get, fully posed as if it is alive, yet a rotting corpse nonethless.
If you ever dealt with real corpses you would know that they really ain't all this disgusting, it is so easy to get used to it that you might be temped to think that the so called natural revulsion is just media installed reaction.
If the uncanny valley really exist, then please explain realistic paintings that have been around for ages, artisit have tried for hundred of years to create realistic images of human beings and we admire their efforts without any sense of revulsion. Same with statues. Do we feel uneasy at madam Thussauds?
Yes we do NOTICE it when a seemingly realistic thing behaves unrealistic but I have the same sense when I see a car in a computer cut scene that doesn't obey the laws of physics and for instance slides.
It has nothing to do with the uncanny valley, if a real human being was holding a glass of water that didn't spill when tipped over you would get the same feeling.
We know how things work and when they don't we get upset. The trick that cartoons and such pull is that they say right up front by their looks that they are not real and therefor things don't have to work as we expect it.
That was the problem with Final Fantasy, it tried to be a human drama and then didn't use human emotions on the faces of the actors. IF it had been a pure action flick with no close-ups there wouldn't have been a problem. It wasn't the uncanny valley, it was just bad acting, if it had been done by humans who could act we would have felt the same.
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Uncanny valley in a nutshell: Is it a "Good Robot" or a "Bad Human"?
But, there is an assumption about what is acceptable... what is the norm? At the moment, we're in a rapid transition phase. There are relatively few human-enough-like examples within our day-to-day existence. I would suggest that as these emulants (to coin a term) become more prevalent and pervasive, their familiarity will reduce the perception of their being bad.
We've come a long ways in the 35+ years since I used an ASR-33 Teletype over a 110-baud modem to a time-shared 8KB minicomputer. That sounds like a long time, and in some respects, it is. Today's generation has seen rapid advancements in game consoles, and even now, the best still appear really good, but still unreal. My guess is that in 5-10-20 years, when the visuals become even better, AND THERE HAS BEEN AN EXTENDED PERIOD OF FAMILIARITY, there will be less of a gap to leap. Not just because the visuals got better, but because we have become more familiar with them.
An aside: Look into the eyes of a young baby. Watch how they make eye contact, and don't let go. Watch how intently they examine you. That's setting up neurons and patterns of what is safe, good, bad, and everything else.
P.S. I wonder if the transition from the old black and white TVs to today's HDTV sets has run through a similar perception challenge?
Yay ! Wonderful low-bandwidth youtube streaming video in all its glorious crap-quality !
The best way to show technical demos about photo-realism !
I can't wait to see the thumbnail sized 60%-quality jpeg screen caps, too !
I feel as much informed about the quality as when watching all those wonderful ads about hiddef screens on the TV.
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Common, Image Metrics, can't you just post a descent hi-quality video file, so we can actually see what your technology looks like ?
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So they make a 3D model of Emily's face (using a 3D scanner, presumably), then they film Emily moving her face, then they deform the model to match Emily's facial expressions, then they superimpose the model on Emily's head.
Er... what for?
At best they'll end up with something identical to the original (but they don't - the model doesn't wrinkle properly and sometimes the tracking is slightly off - you can see her face "float" relative to the hairline and ears).
I could understand the point if they could take expressions from one person's face and replicate them on another person's face (which is something you can do with motion capture - and some clean-up work). But obviously they can't do that automatically, or they would have done it for the demo.
I can see this kind of technology being useful to disguise the transition between an actor's real face and a 3D face (which will later be deformed by hand, or morphed into some creature, etc.), but the demo is so limited (camera doesn't move, the 3D face is almost identical to the real face, etc.) that it seems a long way off from being an alternative to motion capture and manual tweaking. This is like showing some (supposedly) revolutionary new GPU by making it print "Hello World" on the screen. If the technology is so great, why such a limited demo?
What about that funky Replicant teddy bear from Blade Runner? That was all the way IN the Uncanny Valley.
BTW the girl on the video in the article...FAIL. Very, very, VERY creepy.
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No it's not - the technique uses image processing to capture motion, not for generating photo-realistic images. The video shows Emily (a real person) talking, only at the end of the video do they show the results of their capture software by overlaying the generated images over Emily's face. This is Motion Capture not CGI.
Is they are trying to make a perfect looking human...humans are defined by their imperfections. When they airbrush real humans too much it winds up looking fake.
They need to add human imperfections to the CGI models to pass the uncanny valley test.
I think you can already see this effect with heavy body modification that goes on today.
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Yes, I would say the eyes are what throw it off, and as they admit, the eyes are the hard part. But you really have to hand it to them: as "off" as the eyes were, I don't think they were so far off as to be a give-away. They simply made the girl look kind of "disconnected", like she's distracted by something on her mind. She actually wasn't that different from real people I've seen. In a fair test, I don't think I'd be able to pick her out. Say, give me five videos, any number of which could be fake and I have to spot the real ones. (Unless of course the real ones deliberately exaggerate their facial expressions.)
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No, the whole problem with motion capture is that its *not* exact. The results can be pretty faulty, especially when it comes to facial animation and when you then apply those faulty animation data to an equally imperfect mesh you lend right deep down in the uncanny area, exactly *because* its motion capture. With hand animation on the other side an artists can fine tune the results till they look perfect, which however never really happens for realistic facial animation since it would just be way to much work.
You sir are totally correct. Everyone wants to prove that they'll always know what's fake and what's real but, as you said, they're full of it.
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