What is that Uncanny Valley people speak of? Quite often you may hear of it referred to in film and gaming magazines, regarding visuals. You may already understand that people try to avoid their work falling into the Uncanny Valley. I will summarize the phenomenon here for you.

Essentially the term Uncanny Valley, to quote Wikipedia, is:

“A hypothesis that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The “valley” in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot’s lifelikeness.”

This was introduced by Masahiro Mori, a Japanese roboticist. He believed that the closer his androids became to being like-human in appearance and motion, the more positivity and empathy people would show towards them, up until a certain point of realism. At this point the empathy turns into emotional repulsion and the people reject it. See the diagram below.

When something is sufficiently non-humanlike, with characteristics that stand out, we can still empathise with it. The closer something is to becoming real, the flaws that separate it from being real become much more noticeable. It becomes so good it’s bad. Qualities that tend to cause humanoid robots to plunge into the depths of the valley are often similar to that of a corpse or someone very ill. Naturally this is very off putting.

There are scientists and roboticists who completely disagree with the scientific value of ‘The Uncanny Valley’, some saying that when Mori came up with the theory, there was no technology advanced enough to try and seriously replicate a human. Regardless, it is something that is taken very seriously by the film and game industries.

The Uncanny Valley is prominent more than ever with today’s 3D animated film effects and video games. Notable films that are regarded to of fallen into the Uncanny Valley include Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001), The Polar Express (2004) and the recent Beowulf. Final Fantasy was arguably the first film to get a lot of mixed reviews for its closer-to-real-than-ever visuals. Before release, there was panic across Hollywood, that synthespians would replace professional actors. Even Tom Hanks stated his concern over digital actors. The film took 4 years and hundreds of millions in dollars to make, but did not even make back a tenth of its production costs. The losses caused huge problems for Square Pictures afterwards, which was going through a company merge with Enix at the time.

Videos games experience it worse than films, but having always been built up from scratch, as we started to slip into the uncanny, we got worryingly used to it. Being a big Playstation 3 fan, something that worries me is the amount of hype put behind up coming game Heavy Rain, first hyped in 2006. Heavy Rain looks like it will plummet deeper than anything before it. The trailers feature most notably a lot of staring. The woman stares like a dead person. It is all very stiff and although looks great in frame stills, looks pretty nasty in motion. Also with games, since you are in control, there is never enough variation in movement to imply life. That said, technology such as the Euphoria Engine may save us regarding collisions, as mentioned in one of my Bradford Animation Festival posts.

Trying to Cross / Avoid the Uncanny Valley

There is said to be 2 approaches when avoiding the Uncanny Valley. Pixar took one of these when attempting The Incredibles, deliberately keeping to the left of the valley by using exaggeration within the characters. This way, there was no danger of getting too lifelike. The second Final Fantasy film to be made, under the name Final Fantasy: Advent Children, made sure to keep away from ‘super – realism’ and went for an anime edged approach. The result was a cult classic.

The other approach, as seen in Lord of The Rings, was to work from the far right of the graph, working backwards from real human beings. Their result was Gollum, who became a huge success. He was based on m0vement and the voice of Andy Serkis. Though it has to be said, he is not really human at that stage in the film. Though when Andy Serkis used the same techniques for PS3 exclusive Heavenly Sword – suddenly it didn’t work? Gaming platforms just aren’t powerful enough yet.

Below are 2 videos from two different studios who are developing technology to improve facial animation. Be sure to check out their sites for more information.

Studio Pendulum – Alter Ego (Facial Animation Division)

You can see more of the above, in hi-res demos, at the Alter Ego site. Check out the old man in action.

Image Metrics

Below you can see the latest motion capturing technology by Image Metrics. What is different about the Image Metrics technique is that they do not use markers. The software actually analyzes direct video footage. Beware, there is a loud noise at 00.42 in the video immediately below.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6pfz7

Be sure to meet “Emily” (below)

Although these all do look very good, will it helps us out of the valley? Or drop us further in?

It seems impossible to create genuine realism from scratch and it may always be that way. There is always going to be something missing, no matter how good we get at trying. As a graphic design lecturer told me once at college, there is something that animation will never be able provide: a presence within space and time, unique existence at the place where it happens to be. Food for thought.