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The Tipping Point of Humanness
sciencehabit writes "Robert Zemeckis, take note. Using videos that morph the face of a baby or man into a doll, researchers have figured out at what point we stop considering a face human — and start considering it artificial. The ability, the researchers say, is key to our survival, enabling us to quickly determine whether the eyes we're looking at have a mind behind them. It may also explain why so many people hated The Polar Express."
Yo mamma's so fat, the recursive function calculating her mass density had a stack overflow.
Time. Consider our everyday conversations: "Ooh, he's creepy. He keeps looking at my stomach." "Look me in the eye and tell me that." "Watch that customer in the Jewelry department--he's got shifty eyes."
Examining static images of faces has limited (some, but limited) value. When we look at eyes, don't we immediately calculate *what they're looking at*? Much of our assessment of the character and intentions of people and animals seems to be based on how the eyes move.
No reason to hate the puppets. But this does give some indication as to why Nancy Pelosi makes so many people uneasy...
My cats look directly and intently at my face every day, and it's obvious from the circumstances that they recognize that a mind with intent is attached to those eyes and they're eager to figure out what that intent might be (and whether it might adversely affect them). This is not at all a behavior exclusive to primates, much less humans. Presumably that means my cats would have hated The Polar Express, too. They're already annoyed by Tom Hanks' nasally voice.
The study has nothing to do with the point you are making. There is no real world situation where we encounter Polar Express level-of-competence simulacra and our life is threatened if we make an incorrect decision. Claiming "survival," let alone it being "key" to survival, is sloppy thinking by researchers who have apparently internalized some evolutionary pyschology memes.
This ability is presumably a side effect of other valuable mental skills, such as the ability to read facial expression and identify similar looking faces. Which is amazing and the subject of not much study, but no what this article is about and not what the experiment measured.
Scott McCloud has a fairly good chapter on this in his book, Understanding Comics. He demonstrates drawing-space as a three-variabled continuum, a triangle. It's been a while, but I think the points were something like complexity, abstractness, realism. But the crux of the matter was, the simpler the approximation, the more we could associate ourselves in that role, so it became more emotionally immersive. Dory and Nemo's dad were very simplified, abstractified, so we related better.
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The concept of the uncanny valley is a well known one: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UncannyValley
Any single frame looks just like Jeff Bridges sure, but when it's all put together the effect is still a little stiff.
I've noticed a similar issue when watching Nicholas Cage and Keanu Reeves movies.
It's called prosopagnosia. And yes, the uncanny valley works on them. They can see if something is human or not.
What they can't do is decide who the face they see belongs to. Al least not without detailed study of said face.
"Hmm, I see blue eyes with large lashes. A nose with some large pores. The chin is somewhat pointy. I'm guessing this is Jennifer. Oh wait, she wears the same shoes that Jennifer wore three months ago. Yes, I think it might very well be her."
Not exaggerated either.
Whoa!
My blog
Yeah, I guess it'd be pretty important if the zombie uprising ever happens, or the world is taken over by sentient dolls.
Exactly. We don't have any problem seeing emotional life-likeness in even very schematic comic characters, plush animals, and occasionally even objects that don't have a face at all. I'm willing to bet if tomorrow very strange aliens descended from the sky, having totally un-earthlike features, we would still connect with them emotionally without a problem, because we can learn to interpret non-human reactions and features. Yet somehow human characters that are "not quite right" irritate us.
Since even clearly perceived falseness doesn't trip us up at all when interacting with non-human characters, I hypothesize that the uncanny valley could actually be caused by a visual subsystem that deals with recognizing sickness and death in humans, triggering an involuntary repulsion that then is rationalized after the brain realizes it has this reaction mainly when looking at dolls. People do appear to have associations with death as they jokingly described the Polar Express as something reminiscent of a zombie movie. This is probably also the reason why zombie movies (where the undead don't look like live people with excessive makeup) are so effective. That legless zombie girl in "The Walking Dead" pilot creeped me out to no end...
There is no real world situation where we encounter Polar Express level-of-competence simulacra and our life is threatened if we make an incorrect decision
Today, yes.
In evolutionary past... there are lots of illnesses that cause people's minds to degrade (animal minds, too). The most common one that comes to mind is rabies, which also makes people and animals move in a somewhat zombielike, jerky fashion.
In the modern world, identifying a rabid animal isn't quite as needed, since vaccinations have helped to slow the spread of the disease via "herd immunity" even to the "wild", feral animals that live in many cities and urban areas. Go back a century or more, on the other hand, and identifying it early - in livestock, working dogs, and wild animals - was a much more necessary skill. Hell, identifying an infected food animal is important so as not to eat it.
And then there's African trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness), leprosy, Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob, transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (aka "kuru", "laughing sickness"), and other "prion" diseases.
I'm autistic. I don't seem to have the automatic distinction between things with minds and things without minds. In fact, I can occasionally forget that other people have minds, briefly. For instance, a couple of days ago, I was pinching Beloved Spouse's cheeks, and I suddenly got fascinated with how the various components of the face are connected and deform each other. I started messing with this. Suddenly it occurred to me: There is a person experiencing this, and it may not be a preferred experience. But there you have it; for a good four or five seconds, I had completely forgotten that my spouse was a sapient creature. While staring directly at said spouse's face.
I can't think of an occasion on which this has been any kind of survival problem. (My spouse is very forgiving.)
I suspect that it's useful to get this stuff automatically, but it also produces all sorts of strange buggy behavior when we find things that trigger the "that's people" grey matter but which aren't actually people.
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LotR is based on a seminal work of fantasy literature for all ages, read by generations of readers over the decades. So it is fair to say that it already had an established fan-base.
It also featured a whole lot of "real people" actors, most of them of a rather high caliber.
Polar Express is based on a 1980's children's book, based around a character created by Coca Cola's marketing division.
A character that has since then grown into a symbol of consumerism like no other.
Oh, and the animation sucked.
Also, one features a HUGE universe and loads of heroic battles and quests, while the other features... well... public transportation.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I've watched the Polar Express at least a dozen times (our 2 year old is really into trains at the moment). I think there is a problem with that movie besides just the rendering. Tom Hanks' acting was motion captured for practically every character, including the lead boy. Hanks has very specific mannerisms, and I don't think they were ideal for portrayal by CGI characters. For example, he does this stiff-necked type expression, where he keeps his neck stiff and rotates his whole torso part way towards the subject, then he looks at them out of the corner of his eyes (usually with a sort of bewildered expression). It's a very stiff motion, almost like he's wearing a neck brace. He does that several times in Polar Express, and it simply exacerbates the problem and makes the characters look more rigid and artificial. If anything they should have been slightly more articulate and dynamic to compensate for the negative expectations people would already have over the CGI.
I think it's also an issue of scaling. You can't just take an adult, have them pretend they are a child, scale them down to child-size, and have it look exactly right. The proportions and mechanics are wrong for one thing, besides the fact that kids naturally move and act like kids, and adults naturally act like adults.
Originally Hanks was even going to voice every single character, and voice affects would be applied to change the pitch, etc. In fact, there is a trailer floating around in which Hanks voiced the lead boy's voice, and it sounded horrible. I'm glad someone with enough clout was able to step in and convince Hanks otherwise without stepping on his toes too much. I think Polar Express demonstrated the same problem with the motion capture - everyone is drastically different in their motion and mannerism, and if you use one person to portray a dozen different people, then they will all look unnaturally similar. If your CGI movie has 5 lead roles, you need 5 people to act for motion capture, and 5 people to voice, and they should be cast just like for any "normal" movie. It's that simple.
Better known as 318230.
That's because he was 25% CGI and 75% Andy Serkis.
This is the NSA, we're gonna geet U h@x0r5! Also, what is a h@x0r5?
My cats look directly and intently at my face every day
Maybe your cats are just waiting for you to pass on so they can eat you? Actually, I do wonder what they are thinking at such times... maybe something as simple as love.
that the cut-off is at the 67%/33% mark ? After all, one end of the scale is fixed, a picture of a real human, but the other end is not fixed, should they have drawn the line at 99%human/1% lego brick ?
Nullius in verba
They are attempting to calculate the best approach to getting fresh food in their bowl based on your mood and their own. Do they howl until you give in? A little mewl and a flick of the tail? A pur and flop next to the bowl so that you notice it is empty while giving a belly rub? That little head butt thing that says "you one of my people and thats cool with me"? Do they sit on your dinner plate? Do they walk up to a glass of grape juice, look you in the eye and then knock it onto the carpet?
I think Polar Express demonstrated the same problem with the motion capture - everyone is drastically different in their motion and mannerism, and if you use one person to portray a dozen different people, then they will all look unnaturally similar.
I don't think that's a fundamental problem, I think that's a problem with choosing the wrong actor. There are actors that are very good at creating distinct characters through motion and mannerism, and there are actors that have a more limited palette of motion and mannerism. Either -- depending on how well they portray the feeling of a particular story -- can be great actors at playing one role in a piece, but only the former are likely to be successful playing multiple roles (unless they are supposed to have eerily-similar mannerisms) in the same piece -- whether its live action (as in a live "one man" show, or on film using camera tricks) or done via motion capture.
(The same thing that is true of motion and mannerism is true of voice acting; there are actors that can define distinct characters through voice alone, and actors that can't, and either can be good for one voice role in a piece.)
The Polar Express seemed to have "rubbery" motion capture. I used to see this problem at trade shows like SIGGRAPH. The electromagnetic motion capture people would have a stage with a live dancer wearing sensors at her joints, and screens showing the CG character driven from the dancer. The CG character always moved worse than the live dancer. If the dancer did a hard stop, the CG character would show much less abrupt deceleration. That's because the electromagnetic systems were noisy, and had to be low-pass filtered.
There were also alignment problems. The hand positions were usually off. Metal in the area would distort the fields slightly. Around 2000 or so, errors of several inches were still common. I asked one of the demo dancers to touch her fingertips together, and the CG character was off by the breadth of a hand. The Polar Express animation had a similar slightly-off look.
This got better once motion capture started using multiple cameras at much higher frame rates than the animation. There's still some noise and filtering is still needed, but the noise is up at a few hundred Hz and the filters have higher cutoff frequencies. By the time the motion is downconverted to 24FPS, the effects of the filtering have disappeared.
The image of Santa as a plump man was popularized by "A Visit From St. Nicholas ('Twas the Night Before Christmas)" in 1823:
He had a broad face, and a little round belly
That shook when he laugh'd, like a bowl full of jelly:
He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
And I laugh'd when I saw him in spite of myself;
And the modern icon is generally credited to Thomas Nast, circa 1880, upon which Haddon Sundblom based his Coca-Cola ads a full 50 years later. At most, Sundblom popularized the red suit, but he was quite an artist in his own right, so calling it a "character created by Coca Cola's marketing division" is both giving their "marketing department" too much credit, as well as doing a disservice to Sundblom. It's more accurate to say that Coca-Cola's advertising used to consist of actual art.
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No. It's simply wrong and probably a messing up with another character which indeed was created by a marketing campaign.
I can show you Santa Claus pictures going back at least to 1822 showing a white bearded, red clothed Santa Claus (the german "Struwwelpeter" for instance has one).
Santa Claus (Saint Nicholas) was bishop in Myra, a small town in today's southern Turkey. As a bishop, he is wearing a red gown on all depictions of him - showing him with the red ornate of every catholic bishop. In the european catholic countries Santa Claus is still wearing a bishop hat (a mitre), but everything else is very similar to the US version.
And an editorial piece of the New York Times from 1932, several years before the marketing campaign from Coca Cola, already complains about exactly that standardized Santa Claus picture the urban myth attributes to Coca Cola.
No, Coca Cola has nothing to do with the creation of Santa Claus or any of his modern image. It just took the iconography that was already there for a marketing campaign.
But one Christmas character indeed comes from a marketing campaign of that time: It's Rudolph the Rednoosed Reindeer.