In 1978, the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori noticed something
interesting: The more humanlike his robots became, the more people were
attracted to them, but only up to a point. If an android become too
realistic and lifelike, suddenly people were repelled and disgusted.
The problem, Mori realized, is in the nature of how we identify with
robots. When an android, such as R2-D2 or C-3PO, barely looks human, we
cut it a lot of slack. It seems cute. We don't care that it's only 50
percent humanlike. But when a robot becomes 99 percent lifelike-so close
that it's almost real-we focus on the missing 1 percent. We notice the
slightly slack skin, the absence of a truly human glitter in the eyes.
The once-cute robot now looks like an animated corpse. Our warm
feelings, which had been rising the more vivid the robot became,
abruptly plunge downward. Mori called this plunge "the Uncanny Valley,"
the paradoxical point at which a simulation of life becomes so good it's
bad.
Consider Alias, the new title based on the TV show. It's a reasonably
fun action-and-puzzle game, where you maneuver Sydney Bristow through a
series of spy missions. But whenever the camera zooms in on her face,
you're staring at a Jennifer Garner death mask. I nearly shrieked out
loud at one point. And whenever other characters speak to
you-particularly during cut-scenes, those supposedly "cinematic"
narrative moments-they're even more ghastly. Mouths and eyes don't move
in synch. It's as if all the characters have been shot up with some
ungodly amount of Botox and are no longer able to make Earthlike
expressions.
Every highly realistic game has the same problem. Resident Evil
Outbreak's humans are realistic, but their facial expressions are so
deadeningly weird they're almost scarier than the actual zombies you're
fighting. The designers of 007: Everything or Nothing managed to take
the adorable Shannon Elizabeth and render her as a walleyed replicant."
Interesting article, but perhaps a bit short sighted. One thing that has
been boasted about repeatedly in Half Life 2, is the realistic facial
expressions including the reflection of the environment off the eyes of
the characters and the supposedly highly realistic facial expressions.
We'll see if this is just more hype, or if game designers have
recognized (they obviously have) the problem and found the proper
corrections. At some point with graphics technology we would have the
power (assuming we don't already, haven't seen HL2 in action after all
*chuckle*) to simulate facial _expression_ with high detail, and then it
will fall to analyzing facial animations that relate to various
expressions and putting it all down in 0s and 1s.
-Gel
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