{"id":6480,"date":"2010-01-05T06:39:36","date_gmt":"2010-01-05T11:39:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=6480"},"modified":"2010-01-05T09:19:04","modified_gmt":"2010-01-05T14:19:04","slug":"avatar-and-the-uncanny-valley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2010\/01\/avatar-and-the-uncanny-valley\/","title":{"rendered":"<em>Avatar<\/em> and the Uncanny Valley"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/images\/avatar_jakesully_human.jpg?ssl=1\" target=\"_blank\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" title=\"Jake Sully, human (click for larger view)\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/images\/avatar_jakesully_human.jpg?resize=500%2C211&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"211\" \/><\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/images\/avatar_jakesully_navi.jpg?ssl=1\" target=\"_blank\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" title=\"Jakesully, Navi (click for larger view)\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/images\/avatar_jakesully_navi.jpg?resize=500%2C211&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"211\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>We saw <em>Avatar<\/em> the other day, and did the whole 3D, IMAX nine yards. It complicated things a little &#8212; there are many more showings of the plain-old 2D version, and for that matter of the 3D in non-IMAX theaters. But after all we&#8217;d heard about the experience, it seemed the only way to go.<\/p>\n<p>My original intention with this post was just to provide a thumbnail review, along these lines:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px; padding-right: 30px; font-size: 90%; line-height: 1.25em;\">James Cameron, damn him, has done exactly what he said he&#8217;d do: delivered a kickin&#8217;-good movie with mind-blowing special effects and cinematography. He may not be king of the world &#8212; any more than Orson Welles was in 1940 &#8212; but&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Etc., etc.<\/p>\n<p>But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I was interested mostly in one thing: one facet in which the film didn&#8217;t disappoint, exactly, but also didn&#8217;t (probably couldn&#8217;t) <em>quite<\/em> succeed. Before getting into that, though, let me say:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The 3D effects in <em>Avatar<\/em> &#8212; at least, as viewed in an IMAX theater &#8212; go way beyond the lame, unimaginative poke-the-audience-with-a-sword precursors. When little flies and moths beset the characters in the jungle, you may have to fight the impulse to try swatting the bugs away. Or, like me, you may find yourself looking over your shoulder to draw the projectionist&#8217;s attention to the need for an exterminator.<\/li>\n<li>Motion-capture technology, likewise, has leapt ahead since even the (justly) celebrated tools which Peter Jackson and Andy Serkis employed to bring Gollum to life in <em>The Lord of the Rings<\/em> &#8212; particularly in capturing facial expressions.<\/li>\n<li>Technology aside, you&#8217;ll recognize <em>Avatar<\/em>&#8216;s plot and love story from numerous &#8220;civilized man goes native&#8221; films that came before (<em>Dances with Wolves<\/em>, anyone?)&#8230;<\/li>\n<li>Yet, you may still find yourself welling up from time to time.<\/li>\n<li>I thoroughly enjoyed every second of the film. <em>Thoroughly<\/em>. (At some moments, indeed, I felt that I may have been undercharged despite the almost $14-a-pop admission price.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So what didn&#8217;t succeed?<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The images at the top of this post are screen captures &#8212; frames grabbed from the online version of the film&#8217;s 3\u00bd-minute trailer. The one at the top shows the main character, Jake Scully, just as he&#8217;s drifted off in the &#8220;interface pod&#8221; which allows him to animate his alien avatar&#8217;s body from a distance. Below that is the face of Jakesully (the name compressed, per the captioning, into a single word), one of the title&#8217;s avatars: the creature, a member of the Navi race, whom Jake &#8220;becomes&#8221; when in the interface pod. The frames both in the trailer and in the movie are just a few seconds apart, so can be viewed almost as before-and-after pictures.<\/p>\n<p>Oh, yes, there are obvious differences &#8212; blue skin, big yellow eyes, pointed ears. But look more closely.<\/p>\n<p>The first thing you may notice is how remarkably <em>real<\/em> the Navi face seems. The reflectivity of the eyes, for example: highlights appear in exactly the right spots, given the overall lighting, and the irises have those little sunbursts of light-and-shadow which you can see in the eyes of terrestrial mammals. The eyebrows (and the eyelashes which rim the bottoms of the eyes) aren&#8217;t just flat digital brushstrokes, but have individual hairs. Jake Sully has a slight crease below his left eye, and so does Jakesully.<\/p>\n<p>But something seems just&#8230; just <em>off<\/em> nonetheless. Even allowing for the obvious differences, <em>something<\/em> makes Jake Sully&#8217;s face different from Jakesully&#8217;s. Maybe it&#8217;s the pores and creases, both of which are relatively plentiful in the human face but smoothed out in the Navi. Whatever it is, the photograph and the animation are clearly two different media, technologies, choose your word. If you met Jakesully on the street, you would never ever mistake him for an actual living creature.<\/p>\n<p>In wondering about and investigating exactly what it is which separates the subjects of those two images, I came across a bizarre-sounding term which may explain the &#8220;this one is real, this one isn&#8217;t&#8221; feeling: <em>uncanny valley<\/em>. In short, what we might be seeing is the <em>intentional<\/em> artificialization of reality. From <a title=\"Wikipedia, on the uncanny valley\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Uncanny_valley\" target=\"_blank\">Wikipedia<\/a> (emphases added):<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The uncanny valley hypothesis holds that when robots <em>and other facsimiles of humans<\/em> look and act almost like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The &#8220;valley&#8221; in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot&#8217;s lifelikeness&#8230;<\/p>\n[The] hypothesis states that as a robot is made more humanlike in its appearance and motion, the emotional response from a human being to the robot will become increasingly positive and empathic, until a point is reached beyond which the response quickly becomes that of strong repulsion. However, as the appearance and motion continue to become less distinguishable from a human being, the emotional response becomes positive once more and approaches human-to-human empathy levels.<\/p>\n<p>This area of repulsive response aroused by a robot with appearance and motion between a &#8220;barely human&#8221; and &#8220;fully human&#8221; entity is called the uncanny valley.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;the <em>concept of the uncanny valley is taken seriously by the film industry<\/em> due to negative audience reactions to the animated baby in Pixar&#8217;s 1988 short film <em>Tin Toy<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Never seen <em>Tin Toy<\/em>? YouTube to the rescue (the creepy baby in question makes his appearance at around 50 seconds into the film):<\/p>\n<p><object classid=\"clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000\" width=\"500\" height=\"404.7\" codebase=\"http:\/\/download.macromedia.com\/pub\/shockwave\/cabs\/flash\/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0\"><param name=\"allowFullScreen\" value=\"true\" \/><param name=\"allowscriptaccess\" value=\"always\" \/><param name=\"src\" value=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/OW3HbkXDFbw&amp;hl=en_US&amp;fs=1&amp;rel=0\" \/><param name=\"allowfullscreen\" value=\"true\" \/><\/object><\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know &#8212; <em>revulsion<\/em> seems too strong a word to me, or maybe I&#8217;ve just got a strong stomach. But I get the point: if you want an audience to squirm, without knowing <em>why<\/em> they&#8217;re squirming, just put perfectly human faces and movements on an artificial creation which the audience knows cannot possibly be human. If you want to <em>avoid<\/em> discomfiting your film&#8217;s audience, and can&#8217;t make a completely perfect human-like creature, be sure not to try too hard: give your automatons (like the Navi) some at least <em>faintly<\/em> artificial elements.<\/p>\n<p>The (perhaps intentional) artifice in the onscreen Navi extend to the characters&#8217; movements as well. (Which may explain Cameron&#8217;s decision to film the human characters, rather than to animate them as well as the Navi. In only a few scenes do both filmed actors and animated creatures both appear, and &#8212; for me &#8212; the effect was disconcerting.) When the Navi are running or jumping, their movements are just a little too fluid, a little too &#8220;slidey.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>(In online fora, I&#8217;ve seen enthusiasts argue that, hey, this action takes place on a different world: gravity itself might be different, and the very air might be thick enough to make movement vaguely like swimming. Okay, but that doesn&#8217;t explain why the <em>humans<\/em> &#8212; in those combined film\/CGI scenes on the world&#8217;s surface &#8212; seem to move just like they do on earth.)<\/p>\n<p>The point is that this isn&#8217;t a flaw. It&#8217;s not, y&#8217;know, a <em>bug<\/em>, or a sign of limits to current technology. (It wasn&#8217;t until later, when thinking back on the film, that I even put my finger on what seemed false. Like I said, I was too busy enjoying myself while there in the theater.) I&#8217;m just suggesting that maybe what I thought of as a weakness is there (as Microsoft says of certain software &#8220;bugs&#8221;) by design.<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re curious, here&#8217;s the longer trailer for the film (a larger, higher-quality version is available by clicking on the link which follows); keep your own eyes peeled for possible attempts to work around the uncanny valley problem:<\/p>\n<p><object classid=\"clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000\" width=\"500\" height=\"303.6\" codebase=\"http:\/\/download.macromedia.com\/pub\/shockwave\/cabs\/flash\/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0\"><param name=\"allowFullScreen\" value=\"true\" \/><param name=\"allowscriptaccess\" value=\"always\" \/><param name=\"src\" value=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/cRdxXPV9GNQ&amp;hl=en_US&amp;fs=1&amp;rel=0\" \/><param name=\"allowfullscreen\" value=\"true\" \/><\/object><\/p>\n<p><em>[<a style=\"text-decoration: none; cursor: pointer;\" title=\"View 'Avatar' trailer in a pop-up window (requires JavaScript)\" onclick=\"wopen('https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/avatartrailer.html', 'popup', 810, 350); return false;\">See the full-size trailer<\/a>]<\/em><\/p>\n<p>____________________<\/p>\n<p>P.S. Cameron himself is <a title=\"Google search: 'uncanny valley'+avatar+'james cameron'\" href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/search?q=%22uncanny+valley%22+avatar+%22james+cameron%22\" target=\"_blank\">on record<\/a>, as it happens, worrying about the uncanny valley. See <a title=\"ReelzChannel.com: 'James Cameron Discusses Avatar's Uncanny Valley'\" href=\"http:\/\/www.reelzchannel.com\/movie-news\/4184\/james-cameron-discusses-avatars-uncanny-valley\" target=\"_blank\">this feature<\/a> at ReelzChannel.com, among others. For a negative review of the film which deals quite a bit with the uncanny-valley effect, see <a title=\"scanners: 'Avatar plunges into the uncanny valley'\" href=\"http:\/\/blogs.suntimes.com\/scanners\/2009\/12\/avatar_plummets_into_the_uncan.html\" target=\"_blank\">this <em>scanners<\/em> blog entry<\/a> (including follow-ups and comments tacked on at the end) at the <em>Chicago Sun-Times<\/em> site.<\/p>\n<p>(That reviewer, Jim Emerson, seems to have missed a subtle point about avoiding the uncanny valley: if you can&#8217;t create a perfect non-human human, stop trying so damned hard &#8212; because those attempts will just push the audience even further into the trough of discomfort.)<\/p>\n<p>P.P.S. Whatever it means, I have to say I just love the term &#8220;uncanny valley.&#8221; I&#8217;d love to sample a ranch dressing from there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We saw Avatar the other day, and did the whole 3D, IMAX nine yards. It complicated things a little &#8212; there are many more showings of the plain-old 2D version, and for that matter of the 3D in non-IMAX theaters. But after all we&#8217;d heard about the experience, it seemed the only way to go. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[183,247,94,95,13,53,274,17],"tags":[1572,1573,1574,1575,1576,1577],"class_list":{"0":"post-6480","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-everyday-life","7":"category-ruminations","8":"category-02_in-the-news","9":"category-science-medicine","10":"category-05_media","11":"category-movies-media","12":"category-cartoons","13":"category-04_technology","14":"tag-avatar","15":"tag-james-cameron","16":"tag-the-uncanny-valley","17":"tag-3d","18":"tag-imax","19":"tag-motion-capture","20":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-1Gw","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6480"}],"version-history":[{"count":30,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6480\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6510,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6480\/revisions\/6510"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}