5 Creepy Ways Humans Are Plunging Into the Uncanny Valley
#2.
Photoshop is Filling Magazines With Dead-Eyed Humanoids
On the magazine cover below, what appears to be a department store mannequin is in fact supposed to be 63-year-old TV chef Paula Deen:
What the hell?
Look, as long as there have been photos, there have been tricks to make models look their best. We have no problem with that -- if we're ever stuck on the cover of a magazine, we hope they take the time to edit the red out of our bloodshot eyes and pixelate out the nudity. Photoshop is just one more tool for editors to clear up whatever the hair and makeup team miss.
So what's the problem?
This isn't about how fashion magazines create an unrealistic body image for women to live up to -- simple makeup, lighting and supermodels can accomplish that. It's the fact that they now have to tamper with every photo until it crosses from "real" to "perfect" to "too perfect" to "THIS IS SOMETHING FROM MY NIGHTMARES."
Nobody's head is that big. What's wrong with her?
They aren't just erasing blemishes anymore, or smoothing over wrinkles to take off a few years. They're erasing the humanity. Limbs and torsos are getting pinched and twisted into deformed horrors:
This model's waist is both physically and geometrically impossible.
What makes the Paula Deen example so baffling is that she's not a supermodel. She's an elderly TV cooking show host. Her job doesn't depend on her looks in any way. Which is fortunate, because a sentient doll has apparently ripped off her face, and is wearing it as a mask.
It doesn't matter what your profession is -- it's now so common to manipulate faces into these ageless Madame Tussauds wax museum exhibits that no human-looking face can be allowed on a cover.
This man is made of wax.
#1.
CGI Humans Are More Terrifying Than Ever
The entertainment world badly wants to perfect a digital character indistinguishable from a real human. Every failed attempt (see: Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within) just encourages them. On the one hand, animators are definitely getting closer to creating images that are so perfect the average viewer can't tell he's looking at someone who doesn't exist. For example, meet Emily:
Pretty, yeah? Wait until you see her talk.
Yikes. According to her creators, she is the first CGI creation to make it across the gap that is the uncanny valley. She's so human-looking you won't be able to accept her as anything but human after seeing her. Except for the fact that it doesn't work, this project was a complete success. At freaking us out.
So what's the problem?
While a still image of Emily looks pretty normal, the video has subtle hints of wrongness. Her eyes and mouth don't quite sit right. There are seconds where her mouth stretches oddly, just enough to tip you off that either something is amiss or you're as high as a kite. That's the thing: Humans have evolved to recognize hundreds and hundreds of little nonverbal cues in the faces of the people we're talking to. Mimicking that nonverbal communication is much harder than simply imitating human speech.
To achieve just this level of reality the creators started out with a real actress talking, then broke down her movements into smaller and smaller movements, and then painstakingly recreated those same movements using a computer, all the while ignoring the nagging feeling that there's probably an easier way to catch a human on video.
"Ya think?"
Dissecting humanness into smaller and smaller pieces works great when you're a cannibal or a pathologist, not so much when you're trying to recreate a human. The eyes are just a little too much on the corpsey side to pull it off. At best, you end up with characters who creep you out in a subtle way, like an uncle touching your knee casually.
Of course, then you have the much more common and more crude examples on your nearest video game console:
Pretend the ball is your leg, and Kobe is "Uncle Kobe."
Or you can look at the "revolutionary" technique that gave us the most horrifying version of Tom Hanks ever put on film ...
And that's including The Da Vinci Code.
We seem to have entered a weird era in which we're many years away from computer hardware powerful enough to perfectly mimic human features, but our movies and video games insist on trying their damndest. The result is that 50 years from now, our grandchildren will dig up our DVDs and game discs and will find this whole era to be as creepy as shit.
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Paula Deen is sucking out my soul 0_o
ReplyEmily wasn't creepy to me until they started changing her face up to point out that she isn't real. Then my brain was like, "Oh Goodness Creepy!"
ReplyI had no idea that Emily was CGI until the article pointed it out! Granted, I have Asperger syndrome and bad eyesight so reading faces isn't exactly a speciality of mine.
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesOn another note...I see little wrong with anything in this article. Sure, it might be off-putting to myself and other people but everyone has their own hobbies and preferences. Oh, I forgot; this is comedy. Never mind!
I actually figured she must be CG due to the article, & saw little hints here & there. But even knowing that, it's some of the most realistic CG facial movement I've ever seen.
I could tell because she had dead eyes... If you look during the half second when they show the model for the CGI, you can see the difference more easily. But yeah, the image's eyes look so very empty of everything, most especially empathy,
For me it's the hands... CGI hands are always a little too big, or the joints are out of proportion, and the animators never seem to know what to make the characters do w/them.
Both lady gaga and the picture below her used CG to get that look on their eyes. Just saying, I watch the makeup tutorials from the girl in the bottom pic of anime 2 section and she's not apart of that weird subculture. That tutorial was "How to look like Lady Gaga in bad romance"
ReplyIs it just me, or does the Conductor look like Theodore Roosevelt?
Reply"...all the while ignoring the nagging feeling that there's probably an easier way to catch a human on video."
ReplyThis. This line is made of win.
Great article.
ReplyI'm surprised they mentioned nothing of Second Life..
ReplySuch as?
I would say that has nothing to do with HUMANS plunging into the uncanny valley, but the same can be said for many of these so yeah sure, why not second life?
It has nothing to do with the uncanny valley but I guess we are making our species so f*****g stupid that they don't know what it means anymore that we can just slap the label on any game that disturbs us for any reason.
Hey could you hand me that revolver? The cyanide pills too, need to make sure this works.
The last image you used is of Michelle Phan, a world-renowned make-up artist who was asked to show how to make yourself look more like an anime character WITHOUT doing anything permanent and/or dangerous. She just used everyday make-up and false eyelashes to create that look.
Replyi don't believe that. everything looks 'real' except those huge irises.
The thing with Emily that doesn't sit right for me is the blinking. It seems like she blinks too slowly and deliberately. Her mouth also just seems to float on her face.
ReplyYou can always follow up that last one with an article about CGI movies that have aged really really poorly.
ReplyMeh, I think the main thing that sets me personally off about the emily girl computer thinger is that her movements seem almost too...unlabored. Like normally for people you can see muscles moving and all the little inner workings that go into something like facial and head movement, but when she does things like moves and tilts her head, she just kind of seems to move. It doesn't seem like she's the one moving her head, because you can't see all the twitches and movements in her neck that would normally result from that sort of movement. Her face itself looks really pretty good, I just think it's the more peripheral stuff that's a giveaway. Also, she's far too perfect looking; by that I mean not only does it looks like she would be wearing a ton of makeup, but also there are no wrinkles in her forehead when she makes expressions and no creases when she moves in certain ways where there should be. There are just a lot of really tiny things that alone wouldn't be that weird, but together start to add up.
ReplyThe thing is if I was just shown that video with no preface and she was made to be talking about something else, I would maybe think like "Why does she seem just a little off to me?", but that would probably be the extent of it. There are no dead give aways (I mean, they do use real actors to do it, so in reality they're working off of a real person originally), but they're still not at the point in which one would be completely oblivious to the fact that she isn't real.
I'm pretty sure the only thing that's CG in the video is her face.
Emily looks a little like my dad, who has some loss of nerve sensation in his face. Just enough to make it creepy until you get used to it (in both cases).
ReplyIf I didn't know beforehand that Emily was not real, I would've accepted that she was. Her mouth tilts a little too much too often, and she looks like she needs glasses because her eyes don't seem to move quite the way they should, but those could all be explained if she was born with some kind of speech or facial muscle impairment.
ReplyI just thought of what Porn can do with Emily
ReplyOmg in 4 the sad part is i know what some of the characters names are
ReplyThere is nothing "real-to-the-touch" about a RealDoll's skin.
ReplyAnd you know this.... how?
The Final Fantasy movie is wonderful considering it was released in 2001. It was *the* first feature length movie with photorealistic CGI, almost a decade before Avatar. Production was 4 years and the first scenes of the movie had to be redone because the technology had already become obsolete by the time the final scenes were rendered. Maybe it was too ambitious, but it was hardly a failure. It's a very underappreciated movie which I hope will be remembered along with Avatar as being a milestone in filmmaking.
ReplyI was pretty convinced by Emily. To me, the tipoff was not her expressions, but her utterly perfect complexion. Also, her face seems to almost float in front of her head at times. In reality, people have blemishes, scars, beauty spots, VEINS, etc., and makeup can only cover so much. The same applies to magazine covers. I'm not saying realistic is acne, but people pick up on all the details on another's face and this needs to be acknowledged for truly 'realistic' facial animation.
It had pretty s****y voice acting and writing, but other than that, it was kind of impressive.
I noticed the things that were wrong with Emily, but it wasn't creepy at all. Just because someone doesn't look perfectly human does not mean they are in the uncanny valley.
ReplyI sure had trouble telling the real person and the CGI version apart. I don't know what she's going on about in the end.
Emily looked really normal in that video and really human-like...even so, I got a horrible chill watching the whole thing.
Reply