Leaping the Uncanny Valley 421
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."
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Not really animation (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:We've heard this before (Score:3, Insightful)
It's more convincing than... (Score:4, Insightful)
...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.)
End of blah blah (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not really animation (Score:5, Insightful)
All you need is video of somebody of similar build and you can put anybodies face on it.
Re:Not really animation (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. This isn't precisely computer animation, it's motion capture minus a lot of steps.
Re:It's very close. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:We've heard this before (Score:3, Insightful)
Not a good test (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Wow, quite amazing. (Score:5, Insightful)
Btw, here's a direct link to the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLiX5d3rC6o [youtube.com]
Be sure to tick the 'Watch in high quality' when the video opens (anyone knows a way to do that automatically in a link?)
Re:End of blah blah (Score:2, Insightful)
Yup (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Different types of faces? (Score:2, Insightful)
How true was this? (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Uncanny valley... (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Re:Not really animation (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Wow, quite amazing. (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the question is exactly what are they faking?
It seems they're building the face images out of a data model. They've done a good job on things like skin (a very complex biological structure). But where did they get the model? From an actress. So it's something like turning Andy Serkis in to Gollum, only more streamlined from a workflow standpoint.
When they can build the model from general instructions ("OK, 'Emily' should look angry here.") then they've got something which is, in a sense, scientifically impressive. But for now, they have something which is technologically impressive.
The demo is a streaming video ?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 ?
Re:How true was this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:We've heard this before (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How true was this? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:It's more convincing than... (Score:4, Insightful)
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 noticed, too, that there seemed to be too much weird movement. I actually suspect that's due to the real actress hamming it up too much for the capturing process, trying too hard to make it natural. I bet if they used someone who didn't know what it was for, it would've come out better.
Re:How true was this? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.).
Re:We've heard this before (Score:3, Insightful)
Am I missing something? (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Umm... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:It's very close. (Score:2, Insightful)
The problem with CGI so far... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:How true was this? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Uncanny in the other direction (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's very close. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.)
Re:It's the real deal (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:It's very close. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:End of blah blah (Score:3, Insightful)
It could easily be argued that pitch correction and sampling ruined popular music, and things like photoshop and other image modifications have ruined the visual arts.
Re:We've heard this before (Score:5, Insightful)
You're just imagining things. The real Emily undoubtedly sometimes opens her mouth a little too wide...probably moves centered around her nose.
If you pay attention to the video, you'll notice that they flat-out said that it isn't computer generated imagery. They're just doing face tracking without using markers and mapping that to a mesh.
Big deal. People do that now and get extremely realistic (perfect) results. All you need is two cameras.
It would be interesting if they were actually generating models from this that could work independently (i.e., get CGI-Emily to move in a way that real Emily hasn't been recorded as moving), but they aren't claiming that they can do that...so they probably aren't.
Would it be easy to film somebody with a 3d camera setup and shove them into a video game? Well, I suppose there are a few technical challenges in the sense that there aren't any 3d-movie inside-videogame codecs, but its nowhere near as impressive as the headline makes it out to be.
Re:We've heard this before (Score:1, Insightful)
The lips would re-proportion to the rest of the face, or would not tilt with the rest of the face.
The teeth in the mouth were too wide for the jaw outside the mouth.
The nose would not twitch when the lips smirked.
The eyes did not crinkle when the lips smiled.
I've had difficulty seeing the "uncanny" of the valley before, but this really set off my creepymeter.
Re:How true was this? (Score:2, Insightful)
Corpses don't have anything to do with the uncanny valley, and neither do mounted animals.
Those actually are the things they look like, they're just unmoving versions of them. It's not CGI fur or a computer generated face.
Any revulsion anyone feels is due to their deadness, not the fact they look like what they actually are. (In fact, it is often remarked that dead people just look like they're sleeping.)
Same thing with pictures. A picture of a real thing looks like...a picture of a real thing. We do not have uncanny valley issues with pictures.
Arguable, we do have such a valley when we are born, but we lose that about 2 or 3, when we realize that pictures are not the actual thing and people do not live in the TV.
Re:Umm... (Score:3, Insightful)