Ever noticed how a 10*10 pixel characters in Lemmings looks great, but that the 20k polygon players in Top Spin look really strange?
It’s called the uncanny valley: We have strong emotional response to things that are not terribly realistic, but when things look almost human, any minor discrepancy (such as weirdly bending fingers or odd-looking faces) is strongly disquieting. In other words, higher-resolution models may not look more real, but less real.
The concept comes from Masahiro Mori. Dave Bryant has a writeup on it here.
(Courtesy of Antifactory / somebody who mentioned it at the Imagina 2004 conference.)
This reminds me of the problems inherent in realistic depiction in games where interactivity is concerned. When you go down the road of realism you eventually have to contend with cognitive dissonance on some level due to some depiction not agreeing with its actual function… like the door that can never be opened because it’s really just a background element. When the game’s visual elements are deliberately non-realistic, such expectations don’t form in the player’s mind.
Maybe there is a similar reason that contributes to Mori’s uncanny valley?
Oh yeah… Would This be considered to be in the uncanny valley? ^_^
How uncanny, Jesper and I stumbling independently into the valley almost simultaneously.
Actually I had seen a diagram of the uncanny valley years ago clipped into the collage of a lyric sheet of a Peter Blegvad album, and always been fascinated.
More recently (and rather inevitably for me) I have become curious about the substantial overlap between the uncanny and the erotic. Imagine an ‘unusually beautiful’ woman wearing too much make up, or a kink in full-body latex. These ‘super-realistic’ erotic strategies evoke uncanny reactions, sometimes of disgust, sometimes of desire, depending on the cultural background of the viewer. Thus Lara Croft becomes a sex symbol for many, but gives some of us the creeps. Maybe her erotic appeal will die down when she gets too realistic.
The interesting thing is that uncanny may also be applicable to all digital expresions of humanity. Like having an email correspondence with an individual which gradually reveals itself to be a cleverly designed script. In other words, it is not just the ‘look’ of the thing. Game designers should pay attention to this aspect too, although my guess is that they will be precoccupied by the visual, and motor modelling.
One final contradiction (an extension of an idea raised by Freud in his essay on the Uncanny): Zombie movement is easier to model ‘convincingly’ in software than the movement of ‘healthy people’. They can make the baddies look exactly like ‘real’ zombies. Well, I’m convinced.
Trees and crowds.
These are two things that have distracted, and often annoyed, me in games and films for several years.
Crowds in sports games have often possessed a uniformity of action that, from a distance, looks like an impossibly synchronised group action. No matter how “realistic” and fluid the motion of the players has been, the crowd has been a vacuous backdrop. Tennis games have, personally, seemed to me to be the worst culprit of this.
Trees. Project Gotham Racing is now on its fourth title (if you count the original Metropolis Street Racer). Yes, the cars are lovely; really lovely. Reflections are beautiful on the car bonnet. Movement seems fluid and believable. But drive slowly, or stop, on a circuit such as Regents Park and you’ll come across unrealistic trees that seem to consist of a number of “flat” branches and leaves glued together.
Even the crowds in PGR3 are more realistic (though still not perfect), scattering if you drive into the fence. But the trees – they haven’t kept up with the development of other components of the games in terms of realism. And consequently stand out more because of it.
(On a side point, the Ents in Lord of the Rings struck me as being pathetic, more so in comparison to the lavish and monumentally scaled representation of other entities in the films).
Have you seen the trees in SSX: On tour?
http://media.ps2.ign.com/media/740/740948/vids_1.html
They have taken a step away from “realism”. The same goes for WoW I think.