Uncanny Valley in popular culture
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The Uncanny Valley has appeared in several items of popular culture.
[edit] The Uncanny Valley in film
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Although originally resulting from experimental data and applied only to robotics, the principle has been extensively applied to computer animation characters. American film critic Roger Ebert has applied the notion of Uncanny Valley to the use of make-up and costumes of humanoid creatures in movies and the deliberate minimalistic depictions of people in works of anime, specifically in Grave of the Fireflies.
The Uncanny Valley was considered by some to be the reason behind the difficulty in creating computer-animated characters. Critics of computer animated films sometimes invoke the Uncanny Valley when explaining their dislike for a particular film. The principle leads to the conclusion that to generate a positive emotional response in human beings, it is often better to include fewer human characteristics in the entity, lest it fall into the Uncanny Valley.
One example of the existence of the Valley in films is the early Pixar production Tin Toy. There, the baby shown is fully computer generated yet looks less than human and can prove frightening or unpleasant to children. The effect is lessened by the two dimensional nature of the character, but the overly defined wrinkles and (comparatively) primitive rendering of the spittle makes the character appear evil or otherworldly. A similar effect is seen in the doll's head character in the film Toy Story. The character can be again frightening to children because what it is, in essence, is an ambulatory deformed human head. Even if it is not frightening, most children prefer the cute appeal of the aliens or indeed Woody because there is less human resemblance.
In 2001, Square Pictures' photorealistic movie, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within failed at the box-office and is often cited as a possible victim of the Uncanny Valley. The movie was the first major wide-released CGI film to feature photorealistic human characters, and in turn brought about quite a bit of attention from movie critics and filmmakers alike. The Uncanny Valley theory is thought to be most prominent in Final Fantasy's character movements.
It has been said the best way to accomplish convincing human movements and to "jump" the Uncanny Valley in computer animation is to combine both motion capture and keyframing techniques. Though the former has become a popular technique, keyframing is still widely used throughout the animation industry. The film adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, which features the character Gollum, uses this combined technique with stunning results. Note, however, that Gollum's eyes and face were animated using only keyframing, and that the Gollum animation also featured other advances in modelling (including skin texture, and effects such as saliva around lips) which allow the character's external appearance to reach the far side of the Valley. Nevertheless, one obvious caveat with Gollum is that the character is evidently non-human (and, indeed, intentionally uncanny from the start) and so may not trigger the same response as a human figure would when modelled using the same techniques.
Despite advances in computer animation, some feel the Uncanny Valley affected two CGI films of 2004, The Incredibles and The Polar Express. The close dates of release led to many critics' comparison of the two movies, with some preferring the deliberately stylized appearance of the characters in The Incredibles over the more human-like characters in The Polar Express (which were described by many critics as being "disturbing"). Another reason believed to contribute to the unnerving look of the characters in 'the Polar Express' was the use of Performance Capture technology. This technology, when applied to 3D characters has been seen as having a large part in the failure of such films as The Polar Express citing a disconnect between the audience and the characters. This has not been the case in studios which still employ traditional techniques to 3D models, such as Pixar in 'the Incredibles', which some believe allows them to avoid entering the Uncanny Valley.
The CG animation Final Flight of the Osiris in the Animatrix also suffers from this - although, as this was also made with the same techniques as in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, it was in some ways expected to. Erotic sequences with Uncanny Valley characters, as featured in Final Flight, are particularly disturbing, since they provide conflicting messages of "this is arousing" and "this is non-human".
Total Recall gives a good example of how uncomfortable one can feel towards Uncanny Valley encounters when Arnold Schwarzenegger attempts to pass through martian customs disguised as an overweight woman. This effect may even apply to non-human characters who are supposed to have human traits: another example might be the difference between the titular canine in the first Scooby-Doo movie, versus the dog's warm and likeable (but much less detailed) appearance in the original cartoon.
The Uncanny Valley is also a plot point in some movies about robotics. A.I.: Artificial Intelligence centers on a future where many people are disturbed at how realistic the new line of androids is. For example, a rowdy crowd that rejoices in watching robot destruction derbies called "Flesh Fairs" falls silent when the next subject about to be ripped apart appears to be an adorable human boy. In I, Robot (the 2004 movie), the newest wave of U.S. Robotics robots is far more humanoid in facial expressions and appearance. This disturbs main character Det. Del Spooner, who was already bothered by the boxy metal robots that preceded them. "Why do you give them faces?" he asks one of the robots' programmers as he stares into a sea of identical new robots. He then discharges his firearm into the "face" of a robot at point-blank range, effectively making his point to the movie audience who will gasp at the sight of him "executing" a "person."
Blade Runner also hinted at this phenomenon, as the central character in the film, Rick Deckard, overcomes the valley with the android Rachel, and other "replicants", as they were known in the film. The novel on which that film was based, Phillip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", delved even deeper into what empathy for androids (humanoid robots) would mean, what it would take to achieve it and what happens when it fails.
The Rotoscoped film, A Scanner Darkly, also based on a Phillip K. Dick story, uses the Uncanny Valley to serve its drugged up atmosphere, making the visuals at once beautiful and disturbing.
In 2007, a CGI likeness of the deceased Orville Redenbacher was used in a television advertisement promoting popcorn. Critics have commented on the "creepy" appearance of the likeness. [1]
In some cases, the uncanny valley can diminish the desired effects in a horror film. In The Lost Boys commentary track (1:02:25), director Joel Schumacher talks about how prosthetics for his vampire features could have taken away from the realism of the characters.
[edit] The Uncanny Valley in art
Author Scott McCloud offers a somewhat different version in his dissection of comic art, Understanding Comics. McCloud argues that simpler cartoon figures leave more room for interpretation and elicit greater empathy from the audience. A cartoon's simplicity and iconic form is closer to the way we understand our own internal shape. As a drawn figure takes on more detail and approaches photorealism, the more it becomes a representation of an 'other' and so becomes more difficult for the viewer to identify with.
It is important to note that McCloud is dealing primarily with representational art, such as video games, comics and animation, and not encountering simplified humanoid entities in the 'real' world as Masahiro Mori was examining. A short essay by Mori, however, does concern the subject of art: he suggests that artistic idealizations of the human figure may actually be higher up the right-hand curve of his graph than an actual human face (citing traditional representations of the Buddha as an example).
[edit] The Uncanny Valley in games
As videogame consoles and personal computers become more powerful, gamers will be seeing more of the Uncanny Valley, especially on seventh generation hardware.
Graphic chip manufacturers NVIDIA and ATI (now part of AMD) routinely develop technology demos that show ever more realistic human characters.[2]
At past E3 trade shows, Sony has shown technology demos that creep into the Uncanny Valley. In 2000, they demonstrated the Playstation 2 emotion engine with a realistic old man's face, and in 2005 promoted their Playstation 3 with a demo of actor Alfred Molina's face with realtime lighting, subsurface scattering, and realistic expressions. In 2006, Electronic Arts showed a computer-generated head of Tiger Woods using a new motion capture technique marketed as Playable Universal Capture (UCap).[3]
Another demo was from the upcoming game with working title Heavy Rain. The demonstration shows a woman auditioning for a part in the game, and shows off what is possible with next-generation videogame consoles.[4]
