You know, when you have mentioned the Valley before, you have mentioned skin and eyes. But for me, it's always the mouth that looks the creepiest. The interplay of shodow and delineated teeth are always creepy in digital, to me.

That Watts capture is a good example. That's a mouth only a Lovecraftian horror could love.

The latest Call of Duty commercial ("I told her I was a general... and she BELIEVED ME!") really freaks me out for the same reasons.

Interesting as always, Clive.

"When an avatar is cartoonish, our brains fill in the gaps in the presentation to help them seem real."

Not sure what you mean by this--I don't think cartoon characters seem "real" or "convincing", they just seem ... non-creepy. The problem certainly isn't due solely to the closeness to "reality" either: there's never before been a problem with an uncanny valley in the history of art, from cartoons to photorealistic portraits to everything in between. (And the same psychological effect applies to the physical analogue: dolls, puppets, masks, etc. vs. robots.) For some reason the problem arises only when you attempt to use computers to make things look more and more realistic.

MoXmas, yes, the mouth -- migod. I really do wonder what Naomi Watts herself thinks of this ...

I haven't seen that commercial, kickslop. Is is available online anywhere?

Michael, what I meant is that they seem lively and perhaps emotionally convincing: I'm drawn in, I care about them, they feel like genuine characters with real emotions. Your point about creepy vs. non-creepy is interesting. Perhaps if I were to study virtual Naomi long enough, I'd feel empathy for her virtual feelings as I do for Calvins in Calvin and Hobbes ... perhaps the problem with creepiness is that I get so freaked out while interacting with her that I shut down?

Oh, and, that's a great point about animation vs. other media!

Though it's not true of robotics at all. Indeed, Mori developed his theory specifically by noting that little, unintelligent, highly stylized robots seemed more "alive" and funny and cute to viewers than highly realistic, human-looking automatons; the latter looked like zombies, or wax sculpture brought to life, and made kids cry. As I noted in my previous column on this, my Roomba seems highly "alive" and cute partly because it's so endearing low-rez.

However, you could argue that the Valley effect certainly does not hold for human portraiture. Stylized Picasso portraits can seem insanely creepy, while a photorealistic Victorian oil painting can be perfectly lovely and inviting.

I think most of this has to to do with movement. In any static medium, the algorithm of increasingly-realistic = increasingly-creepy does not necessarily hold. But in any medium where the depictions of people move -- animation, robotics -- we'd hardwired to notice zombified, slack, or just-plain-"wrong" human faces.

I have a background in CG and ever since I started reading about the Uncanny Valley I've just felt there's is only one way to get to the other side. So, I'm all for the ghoulish bleeding edge. I've no doubt we'll eventually see the facial photorealism of the last Matrix movie - and more - on a console or pc.

I think the real key here is how well humans can tell the difference between someone who is alive and dead. It's not the rendering, a dead person is exactly the same physically as a live one, its the internal motion that makes us alive. The breathing, the twiches and subtle pulses, the glimmers in eyes. Perfectly rendering a person just gets exactly what it looks like, a moving corpse. To make them look alive you need to get the blood pumping and the nerves firing...

I think you're getting closer to the truth when you talk about movement rather than skin texture. Skin rendering is pretty much a solved problem in the high-end world of CG feature films, but that didn't help Final Fantasy or Polar Express!

I find that most CG humans fall into the Valley primarily because of the way their faces move (or rather, fail to move). It's a problem we animators face on a daily basis. "Keep it alive" is a commonly heard phrase in animation dailies-- it's shorthand for a whole collection of little movements of the eyeballs, eyelids, cheeks, brows, mouth and jaw. Leave any of those little movements out, and the character dies or "goes puppety". And as subtle as they are, they require a surprising amount of thought to do properly. That's because they're almost always dependent on the character's social, mental and emotional context, not just their physical environment.

As long as movies and games keep getting made without paying attention to those details, they will keep falling into the Valley.

If you haven't yet read "Understanding Comics" by Scott McCloud put it at the top of your to do list. He explains very clearly how and why the brain processes cartoony VS realistic images in the beginning of the book. In a nutshell, the less precise the image is, the easier it is to imagine a character as ourselves or people we know. Specifics add barriers to empathy because they distinguish a character enough to make them read as strangers.

But aside from that, it's esily the best book I've ever read on making art (whether you're in comics or any other media). The guy is a total genius.

As for the present "uncanny valley" effect, couldn't we solve it by just making sure all the games for now involve undead adversaries? I mean, if you're fighting zombies in the first place it seems like an asset all of a sudden.

Nice piece, Clive. I thought the same thing when I played Quake 4 -- and Doom 3, and Black and White 2 and just about any other game I've played in the last little while. The scenery is amazing, the people... less so. They're so wooden and puppet-like that they almost make Keanu Reeves seem human.

Mathew

You need to be very careful with design in order to avoid the uncanny valley. I think that's the key. What you want, is that you want to avoid "normalcy".

So I didn't really get that feeling, for example, watching Advent Children the way you get it watching The Spirits Within. Because one is a fantasy setting, the other tries to be uber-realistic. Huge difference.

So what do you need? Big, bold designs I think are key. It distracts your mind away from "normality", which is the cliff that they tend to fall off of pretty quickly.

Actually. I look at the posters I have in my room (big beautiful wall hangings..), one of Squall and Riona, a very romatic looking..and kinda creepy looking picture...(I mostly like the other effects of the picture), and the Auron bio pic from FFX (The one with the two Zanarkands in the background). That doesn't look creepy at all. It looks dignafied..again, because of the big, bold designs.

There's a secondary issue, and that's the issue of smoothness. I'll give an example. Legolas jumping off the Cave Troll. It was WAY too smooth for the scene, and it was obviously fake. But this has to do with motion, and not imagry.

To echo JTU's sentiment, at least we can look forward to some amazing & realistic zombie games over the next few years...
Also, I'm with Anthony on this one - we can talk about the Valley all we want, but the most likely way to get through it is to blast ahead full steam and hope for the best. 10 years from now we may well covet games that fall in "The Uncanny Valley" genre precisely BECAUSE they're so weird.
Graphics are great, but what the gaming industry could really stand to benefit from is more innovative gameplay and design.

What about Half-Life 2? Whereas at games like Doom 3 all of the animations are pre-manufactured in a animation editor, HL2 leaves much of it to the physics and their character animation and face poser.

Valve tackled the problem well already with the HL1 when they started using bone system to animate characters. If you want the animation to look natural within the giver reality of the game (that doesn't mean realistic in the first place) it must rely on the system of the game itself, not on the external editor that brings the character to life before it is incorporated into the game. This then causes imbalance of the graphical elements of the game which result as eerie characters or other models bland enviroments, etc...

I was going to mention Half-Life 2 as well. I thought one of the freakiest scenes in HL2, not because of the Uncanny Valley but because it was so extremely realistic, was the part early in the game in which you see the Metrocops bust in a door while you're exploring a hostel in City 17. It was like watching an episode of Cops unfold right in front of you.

It's interesting, I just found out that VALVe wants to incorporate another effect into their games:
http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showthread.php?t=97324&page=2
Just read it your self. It's just another proof of what I was saying.