Delicious LiveJournal Links for 8-20-2008

[andrewducker]

• Emily is Not Real
  In which motion capture skips over the uncanny valley and presents you with something entirely believable. Impressive
  (tags: motioncapture animation cgi)

Comments

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Not bad, but I think that it'd be obviously CG on a bigger screen.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

A CGI face stuck onto an otherwise real actress? I am underwhelmed (by the effect - the tech is no doubt fab).

Looks Ok on a small PC screen - if botoxed to near-death counts as Ok these days. The lack of fine movement of most of the face is obvious (especially when you see the real actress at the end for comparison).

[johnbobshaun.livejournal.com]

I find the effect here actually *more* creepy than, in say, Beowulf.

[darkoshi]

It is believable, but there is still something "off" about it. The mouth looks wrong to me - slightly in the wrong position at times, and the lips too big in places... Sort of like watching someone who had a birth defect in that area of the face. Some people have faces like that, so it is believable.
Would have been nice if they had switched to a clip of the real actress' face, for comparison purposes.

[andrewducker]

Pop to their website (link on youtube) and you can see simultaneous mapping in action!

[darkoshi]

Ah, at least in the video on their website, I can tell the difference between the faces. For a moment I was thinking that maybe I did have more than a tad of face blindness after all. The CGI face there looks pretty cool, but is still obviously generated.

[darkoshi]

Or (based on ChannelPenguin's comment) did they show the real actress' face at the end, with the label "Plate (Real Emily)? Because that one looks the same as the CGI one to me, in which case I can't see the purpose of having the CGI. And in which case, the real face looks "off" to me too, especially when she quirks her mouth at the end. After switching between both faces, the only difference I see is in the shape of the eyebrows.

[kurosau.livejournal.com]

That was neat. By far the best CGI face I think I've ever seen.

Although it still bothers me how much play the uncanny valley gets. There's no research supporting that theory. It's just something someone came up with as a what if, and then didn't properly study. And yet we so frequently treat it as the complete truth.