realism looks creepy

[miriam_e]

This is a very interesting piece on the paradoxical effect that realistic images in games (and computer-rendered movies) can repel people rather than charm them.
http://slate.msn.com/id/2102086/

I don't think it will last for long though. As animators get better at what they do and we develop better tools, including offloading a lot of the grunt work to AIs, this will turn around. Expect to see truly believable artificial characters in the near future.

I make a prediction here too: not far in the future we will see the first truly alive virtual characters. They will owe their realism to the fact that they will actually be real... albeit inside a computer.

(Now there is redundancy for you -- I used the words "will", "actually", "be", and "real", all of which carry the same meaning.)

Comments

[damien-wise.livejournal.com]

As the article points out, when you read down, this phenomenon is hardly news.
Apart from the psychology/instinct angle, it's also a matter of bandwidth versus perception. This is what makes old movies appear jumpy and amusing, yet modern tv appear "real" - it's a related issue.

Three or four years ago, I was speaking with a friend who works as an animator in a large Melbourne-based computer-game company. he said his job as an animator is pretty safe, even with the (predicted) advances in motion-capture. At the time, things could look almost photo-realistic in a still frame (real, past the point of looking "too real", if you know what I mean), yet when animated, it was obvious which was real and which wasn't. At the time, he was re-doing a sequence of someone walking -- something people take for granted and you'd think is easy to mo-cap. Instead, he said, it appeared that the animated person had some sort of muscular/nervous-system syndrome, which invited guffaws and comparisons with Kryten from "Red Dwarf".

The technology is improving, though, and I'm inclined to agree with your prediction WRT "agents" for control/animation of characters. The evolution of Gollum in the three LotR films is a good case in point -- successive films (proportionally) used more motion-capture and less hand-done keyframing...meanwihle, armies of AI-driven extras featured in the background.

As for your redundancy problem, I'd scrap the three words and sub "are". :)

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Yep, I first read of this a few years ago. I thought this was a nice description of the effect though.

I don't understand what you mean by it's also a matter of bandwidth versus perception. Can you expand on that for me?

Old movies are often screened at the wrong speed. When they are shown at the original speed they look much better. Bob Monkhouse had a show on TV which featured lots of old silents carefully run at the correct framerate and the difference was amazing.

I have to say though, that I find old TV shows are almost unwatchable because the acting is so darned strained. I saw an episode of Z-Cars a little while back, which was lauded as a very naturalistic show back in the '60s, but it looks terrbly staged now.

I have agree that animators are safe for some time yet. Even with AIs handling a lot of the detail animators will still be needed -- they will become more and more like directors.

Yeah, it is odd that the mocap revolution never really panned out. No not odd really. I'm on a mocap mailing list and the price of all the rigs being sold take your breath away.

I tend to think that most advancements are going to be in animation languages. We can describe geometry in detail or broad, but it is still very difficult to do anything like that for movement. I have seen one attempt at it, but it was a proprietary system that vanished down the plug-hole when the company which owned it sank. (I hate proprietary systems!!!)