Other Media

Before we move on to talk about photorealistic characters, let’s talk about the Uncanny Valley in other media.  Film is probably the easiest example.

What’s the difference between a film with poor acting and one with great acting?  One sits firmly at the bottom of the Uncanny Valley while the other lies somewhere far up its right-hand slope.  

And what films can get away with bad acting?  Action films where the main character is not intended to be “human” (this includes characters like James Bond).  The best action films end up at the peak on the left hand side of the valley, with characters far enough from everyday humans that they can charm us with their human traits (Bond, Indiana Jones, Ash Williams).

In part, this is due to the fact that the medium of film is largely constrained to using literal human beings as its central characters.  Videogames suffer from no such restriction.  We can use the physicality of our characters to emphasize whatever psychological effect we are trying to achieve.

So What Are the Problems with Photorealistic Characters?

The main problem with presenting the player with a character that is almost, but not quite, human is that all the areas where the character falls short of being human become glaringly obvious.

moscalloutThis doesn’t mean we shouldn’t aim for realistic characters.  It just means we haven’t gotten there yet./moscalloutI’ve seen the same player play a hyper realistic game, get stuck on geometry and say “what the h*$%, that’s so stupid, I’d never get stuck on that” and then play a Mario game and have the same thing happen without it phasing them in the least.

This effect occurs wherever we approach human realism.  Many of you have heard your art teams talk about sub-surface scattering (the light that bounces around under the skin and then gets reflected back out), people notice if that level of detail isn’t present in a human being.  This holds true across all fields...animation, voice acting, you name it.

So Where Does that Leave Us?

This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t aim for realistic characters.  It just means we haven’t gotten there yet.  As I see it, this leaves us with two options when creating characters:

1. We can make next-gen photorealistic models and then try and increase fidelity by removing little glitches, smoothing out animation, perfecting voice acting and assigning human motivations to our characters.

2. We can try and perfect the craft of exemplifying human characteristics in “non-human” characters.

Number one seems like the duty of large developers.  Two seems like the purview of everyone.

Parting Shots

Both these routes are dangerous.  Delving further into creating believable humans is expensive and can easily fall flat.  On the other hand, creating characters that are human enough to make their human traits really resonate with us, while still avoiding the Uncanny Valley, is a fine line to walk.

So in the end it’s not that spending money on graphics is bad.  It’s necessary.  Graphical fidelity should be pushed to the limit. It’s just that graphical fidelity does not equal human fidelity, which is a problem that the industry has yet to admit.

Crazy Talk

I’m going to leave you with one last conjecture. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that, for videogames specifically, the peak on the left hand side of the valley can be as high as that on the right.

I’m out of space, so I’ll just let that hang.  I’d love to hear your thoughts on the idea as well as your arguments for or against it.  

As always, if you have any thoughts or question or insights into how to cross the Uncanny Valley, you can reach me at jportnow@gmail.com.

(CryEngine2 models pictured.)