The uncanny is a problem that happens in animated media throughout the years. You'd thought they/we would learn a lesson or two after decades of making animated media, but no, they had to make Cats (2019), a movie in the absolute nadir of the uncanny valley. Here's an article about researchers explain why the Cats Trailer feels so creepy back when only the trailer was released: https://www.inverse.com/article/57870-cats-trailer-filmed-in-the-uncanny-valley , now imagine sitting through 2 hours of this as an audience, or even worse, making 2 hours of this.
madssnake
On the flip side, I think it's cool how horror movies take advantage of our psychology and play into the uneasy feelings of the uncanny - sort of a way to guarantee that people will be on edge. Wikipedia has a cool graph of where things like a corpse or zombie lie in the uncanny valley. (also a cool read that includes the uncanny valley: Psychological Horror: Pareidolia and the Uncanny Valley)
leerach
It's interesting how the standard for human realism in computer graphics have increased greatly over time, especially with the recent developments of deepfakes. It would be interesting to see how the public response to animations that are too realistic to reality are also interpreted as well.
mooreyeel
If the uncanny valley effect is so strong, why not avoid trying to be too realistic until it is good enough? Also in terms of appearance, is it just one how it looks or how it moves and the small intricacies that make something human, like how the pupils work or something like that?
jonathanlu31
I think how the object moves also plays a part. I feel like if a well designed humanoid robot moved jerkily and unnaturally, that'd still elicit an uncanny valley vibe.
Also, there was a pretty interesting analogy from a YouTube video on the uncanny valley from This Place that generalized the issue as trying to perform any human-like task. The example provided was the task of bouncing a ball. If the roboticist simply wanted to develop a machine to do so without regard for human likeness, they could just make a platform that moved up and down. But if they wanted to model human likeness with a model of an arm, then coordinating all the joints would require much more expertise. Similarly, if the goal is eliciting emotions, then disregarding the natural world and human likeness makes the problem easier since the model to manipulate is much simpler. Whereas if you shoot for human likeness, the animation needs to elicit emotion responses like a human would, which would be a lot more complex.
waleedlatif1
@mooreyeel I think it would be impossible to predict the uncanny valley, which is why it would be close to impossible for animators to avoid it as a whole. With the expansion of animated films into other countries, it becomes increasingly important to see how these faces are received in different contexts, cultures, personal experience, or individual perception. With these factors in mind, it becomes increasingly difficult to avoid it as a whole, considering it also seeps into how the character acts, moves, and shows facial expressions and not just their face.
StaffDanCubed
This article provides some interesting background information on the uncanny valley. According to it, some potential underlying psychological causes include the sense of ambiguity that human-like characters introduce, the inconsistencies and mismatching that comes along with them, and the fact that our survival instincts might kick in because we might view them as dead or diseased (which is what I thought was most likely the case).
StaffDanCubed
Also, I cannot help but notice that in recent years hyper-realistic human models have been making a resurgence, especially in games. Things like GTA and The Witcher comes to mind, and Cyberpunk 2077 even featured a hyper-realistic replication of a well-known actor (Keanu Reeves). As far as I can tell, I don't remember hearing people complain about the uncanniness of these characters nor the games' sales taking a hit because of them, and I wonder why. Has the effect of the uncanny valley been fading because we have been exposed to them so much at this point? Or has graphics simply climbed past the valley?
The uncanny is a problem that happens in animated media throughout the years. You'd thought they/we would learn a lesson or two after decades of making animated media, but no, they had to make Cats (2019), a movie in the absolute nadir of the uncanny valley. Here's an article about researchers explain why the Cats Trailer feels so creepy back when only the trailer was released: https://www.inverse.com/article/57870-cats-trailer-filmed-in-the-uncanny-valley , now imagine sitting through 2 hours of this as an audience, or even worse, making 2 hours of this.
On the flip side, I think it's cool how horror movies take advantage of our psychology and play into the uneasy feelings of the uncanny - sort of a way to guarantee that people will be on edge. Wikipedia has a cool graph of where things like a corpse or zombie lie in the uncanny valley. (also a cool read that includes the uncanny valley: Psychological Horror: Pareidolia and the Uncanny Valley)
It's interesting how the standard for human realism in computer graphics have increased greatly over time, especially with the recent developments of deepfakes. It would be interesting to see how the public response to animations that are too realistic to reality are also interpreted as well.
If the uncanny valley effect is so strong, why not avoid trying to be too realistic until it is good enough? Also in terms of appearance, is it just one how it looks or how it moves and the small intricacies that make something human, like how the pupils work or something like that?
I think how the object moves also plays a part. I feel like if a well designed humanoid robot moved jerkily and unnaturally, that'd still elicit an uncanny valley vibe.
Also, there was a pretty interesting analogy from a YouTube video on the uncanny valley from This Place that generalized the issue as trying to perform any human-like task. The example provided was the task of bouncing a ball. If the roboticist simply wanted to develop a machine to do so without regard for human likeness, they could just make a platform that moved up and down. But if they wanted to model human likeness with a model of an arm, then coordinating all the joints would require much more expertise. Similarly, if the goal is eliciting emotions, then disregarding the natural world and human likeness makes the problem easier since the model to manipulate is much simpler. Whereas if you shoot for human likeness, the animation needs to elicit emotion responses like a human would, which would be a lot more complex.
@mooreyeel I think it would be impossible to predict the uncanny valley, which is why it would be close to impossible for animators to avoid it as a whole. With the expansion of animated films into other countries, it becomes increasingly important to see how these faces are received in different contexts, cultures, personal experience, or individual perception. With these factors in mind, it becomes increasingly difficult to avoid it as a whole, considering it also seeps into how the character acts, moves, and shows facial expressions and not just their face.
This article provides some interesting background information on the uncanny valley. According to it, some potential underlying psychological causes include the sense of ambiguity that human-like characters introduce, the inconsistencies and mismatching that comes along with them, and the fact that our survival instincts might kick in because we might view them as dead or diseased (which is what I thought was most likely the case).
Also, I cannot help but notice that in recent years hyper-realistic human models have been making a resurgence, especially in games. Things like GTA and The Witcher comes to mind, and Cyberpunk 2077 even featured a hyper-realistic replication of a well-known actor (Keanu Reeves). As far as I can tell, I don't remember hearing people complain about the uncanniness of these characters nor the games' sales taking a hit because of them, and I wonder why. Has the effect of the uncanny valley been fading because we have been exposed to them so much at this point? Or has graphics simply climbed past the valley?