Artists climb the uncanny valley
Masahiro Mori's Uncanny Valley hypothesis states that, as artificial beings get closer to resembling real humans, the slightest errors or inaccuracies can shift our responses from empathy to disbelief and even disgust. It's why, in Toy Story, we love Woody and Buzz Lightyear, but are totally unmoved by Andy, their human owner.A good introduction to the subject.
This is something both videogame and movie special effects artists are having to grapple with now that processing power is allowing ever more naturalistic representations of human characters. And grappling with it they are. --Artists climb the uncanny valley (Guardian)
3 Comments
Leave a comment
Recent Related Entries
Famous Programmers From Adleman to ZimmermannLook who's up there with Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper:Famous women programmers are Adele Goldberg, who worked at Xerox PARC laboratory and wrote a number of SmallTalk books, Grace Hopper, a pioneer in the field who wrote the first compiler,...
Immune Attack
Federation of American Scientists (FAS) makes a First-Person Shooter (FPS). Whoever wrote the description of the game won't get a job at PC Gamer anytime soon, but the game itself looks interesting.Players navigate a nanobot through a 3D environment of...
The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete
Wired:The Petabyte Age is different because more is different. Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we...
Inside Google Book Search: U.S. copyright renewal records available for download
Inside Google Book SearchFor U.S. books published between 1923 and 1963, the rights holder needed to submit a form to the U.S. Copyright Office renewing the copyright 28 years after publication. In most cases, books that were never renewed are...
Collaborative Authorship Made Easy
A good overview of the issues relating to using Wikis in the classroom. From the NCTE Inbox Blog:The benefits for collaborative writing should be obvious. Wikis allow multiple authors to edit a text easily. While the video doesn't discuss it,...

I believe that Scott McCloud covered this point beautifully in his "Understanding Comics" complete with visual illustration. I know that the concept surprised me at the time but thinking about it confirmed the idea.
I was at the SIGGRAPH panel on Mori's hypothesis to which the Guardian gives an overly quick pass and posted a summary over on Virtualpolitik (http://virtualpolitik.blogspot.com/2007/08/ishiguros-daughter.html). It's funny that Scott McCloud came up in the other comment, because he delivered one of the SIGGRAPH keynotes (http://virtualpolitik.blogspot.com/2007/08/angriest-dog-in-world.html).
Liz, I was just on your blog reading through your SIGGRAPH summaries... thanks for posting them.