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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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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?
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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Many of the examples you've given don't cross over into "uncanny valley" territory - nobody would get stuffed animals confused with real animals, or people. The things considered to be in the "uncanny valley" are generally attempts at photorealistic humans that get close enough to confuse the observer, and then turn disturbing when they act in an unnatural way. It is similar to your glass of water example, however this is cognitive dissonance on a higher level, because it's dealing with "real" people and sometimes "real" emotions.
Actually, stuffed animals are a good example outside the uncanny valley. Remember, we are talking just about human appearance and action, not animal.
Regarding realistic paintings and statues - yes, they do look like humans, and I would say they reach past the valley on that point, but they don't act like humans. I would also suggest that it is easier for us right now to transcend the valley in appearance than it is to do so in action, if for no other reason because we've had more practice.
Wax figures are another good example. Madame Tussaud's wax figures are excellent representations of the human form - but again, they don't act human, which makes the valley easier to surpass. However, have you ever been to a bad wax museum? I have seen some pretty bad wax figures as well, and they trigger the uneasiness that this theory suggest an inanimate object in this valley would.
As far as cartoons, the physics-defying glass of water - these are all non-human representations, and thus not covered by this theory.
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I'd say it is pretty hard to dispute. We need mechanisms for identifying someone with say, the early stages of leprosy or birth defects (finding the right mate, etc.).
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?
If the uncanny valley really exist, then please explain realistic paintings that have been around for ages
I think what people mostly call the "uncanny valley" is not the result of a work produced by an artists, but the result up motion captured data applied to a computer model (often generated by 3D scanning). The miss-detection in the data and the incorrect mapping from the animation data to the model result in uncanny results and most often you don't have an artist there to clean things up. When you on the other side have an artists to clean things up, the results most often look quite a fine.
I consider the uncanny valley not something that you drop into the closer you get to realism, but something that you drop into when you screw up the balance between different aspects of a work. A perfectly realistic 3D human will look really uncanny if you just stitch it onto a not so realistic animation, since a lot of vital pieces in facial animation and such would simply be missing. On the other side if you take that same animation and stick it to a simpler human model things look quite fine. Its simply a matter to not move the motion and the graphics so far apart that they won't fit together any more. If you have a super realistic face with every wrinkle modeled perfectly, you better have some animation data to make those wrinkle behave realistically in motion, if you don't you better scale back your detail level, since what looks uncanny is that that is there and looks wrong, not those pieces that are simply missing.
Over the course of the last 20 or so years I have seen a ton of stuff that I would consider uncanny and a ton of stuff that I consider to look quite fine, none of the uncanniness however had much to do with the realism, since even a cartoon creature can look quite uncanny when things are out of balance.
I think you can already see this effect with heavy body modification that goes on today.
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