The Tipping Point of Humanness 272
sciencehabit writes "Robert Zemeckis, take note. Using videos that morph the face of a baby or man into a doll, researchers have figured out at what point we stop considering a face human — and start considering it artificial. The ability, the researchers say, is key to our survival, enabling us to quickly determine whether the eyes we're looking at have a mind behind them. It may also explain why so many people hated The Polar Express."
LOTR (Score:2)
It may also explain why so many people loved the LOTR trilogy (Gollum).
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I didn't hate The Polar Express, but it wasn't exactly very memorable.
The simulated Jeff Bridges in Tron: Legacy is pretty decent, though they should have put a little more work into getting his mouth to move naturally when speaking. Any single frame looks just like Jeff Bridges sure, but when it's all put together the effect is still a little stiff.
Re:LOTR (Score:5, Funny)
Any single frame looks just like Jeff Bridges sure, but when it's all put together the effect is still a little stiff.
I've noticed a similar issue when watching Nicholas Cage and Keanu Reeves movies.
Re:LOTR (Score:5, Funny)
Whoa!
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Actually, the effect would have worked just fine if they'd only used it for Clu. After all, Clu was supposed to be a corrupted, visual simulation.
The problem is, they used the effect for that first "Sam as a kid" scene as well, which just didn't look right.
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They also used it for young Jeff at the start of the movie, and in the flashbacks..
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I'll agree. It wasn't the visual design that did it for me, it was the animation.
Looking at the CG face, it *looked* perfectly human, but it didn't move very naturally, and that moved it from perfect into uncanny valley for me.
From behind-the-scenes imagery, it looks like they used a multi-camera head rig with visible-light tracking points (not many cameras, though). There are some shortcomings to this sort of system, and it seems like on top of that they over-interpolated the motion data...
From what I've s
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After Tron: Legacy I told my son Clu's face was very Oblivionesque. I can't decide if they didn't spend enough money/time working on it or they were simply screwed by being up against the uncanny valley.
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Exactly; Gollum was one of the most expressive and real CGI characters I've ever seen.
Re:LOTR (Score:5, Interesting)
That's because he was 25% CGI and 75% Andy Serkis.
Don't Be Too Proud Of This Technological Terror... (Score:5, Insightful)
LotR is based on a seminal work of fantasy literature for all ages, read by generations of readers over the decades. So it is fair to say that it already had an established fan-base.
It also featured a whole lot of "real people" actors, most of them of a rather high caliber.
Polar Express is based on a 1980's children's book, based around a character created by Coca Cola's marketing division.
A character that has since then grown into a symbol of consumerism like no other.
Oh, and the animation sucked.
Also, one features a HUGE universe and loads of heroic battles and quests, while the other features... well... public transportation.
Re:Don't Be Too Proud Of This Technological Terror (Score:5, Informative)
The image of Santa as a plump man was popularized by "A Visit From St. Nicholas ('Twas the Night Before Christmas)" in 1823:
He had a broad face, and a little round belly
That shook when he laugh'd, like a bowl full of jelly:
He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
And I laugh'd when I saw him in spite of myself;
And the modern icon is generally credited to Thomas Nast, [osu.edu] circa 1880, upon which Haddon Sundblom based his Coca-Cola ads a full 50 years later. At most, Sundblom popularized the red suit, but he was quite an artist in his own right, so calling it a "character created by Coca Cola's marketing division" is both giving their "marketing department" too much credit, as well as doing a disservice to Sundblom. It's more accurate to say that Coca-Cola's advertising used to consist of actual art.
See timestamp... (Score:2)
... of this post. [slashdot.org]
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Reading at +3 is a double-edged sword.
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I think he is alluding to the 1930s Coca-Cola marketing campaign in which the first depiction of Santa Clause as we know him now--the fat, jolly fellow with a white beard and a red and white suit (which incidentally were the colors of the Coca-Cola logo)--was introduced.
Depictions of Santa Clause prior to this varied in the colors and girth of the mythical person.
-dZ.
Re:Don't Be Too Proud Of This Technological Terror (Score:5, Informative)
No. It's simply wrong and probably a messing up with another character which indeed was created by a marketing campaign.
I can show you Santa Claus pictures going back at least to 1822 showing a white bearded, red clothed Santa Claus (the german "Struwwelpeter" for instance has one).
Santa Claus (Saint Nicholas) was bishop in Myra, a small town in today's southern Turkey. As a bishop, he is wearing a red gown on all depictions of him - showing him with the red ornate of every catholic bishop. In the european catholic countries Santa Claus is still wearing a bishop hat (a mitre), but everything else is very similar to the US version.
And an editorial piece of the New York Times from 1932, several years before the marketing campaign from Coca Cola, already complains about exactly that standardized Santa Claus picture the urban myth attributes to Coca Cola.
No, Coca Cola has nothing to do with the creation of Santa Claus or any of his modern image. It just took the iconography that was already there for a marketing campaign.
But one Christmas character indeed comes from a marketing campaign of that time: It's Rudolph the Rednoosed Reindeer.
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Rudolph the Rednoosed Reindeer.
he knows when you've been very very naughty...
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Saint Nicholas has absolutely nothing to do with Santa Claus, at least in my original country. The day for him (IIRC now) is on the 6th of December, where you get some chocolates, peanuts, etc. Actually my grandfather my a Saint Nicolas figure, for just that (you could open it and put something inside). I learned in school, that he gave half his red cape to a poor beggar, and that's why he is important.
The christmas presents are brought by the "Christkindl", which is a blond haired woman. When I was a kid
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Well, it was a bit of a Tongue-in-cheek description of Santa Claus, based on a urban not-completely-legend that he was created by Coca Cola in order to sell more Coke during winter.
Actually, he was more like "appropriated" for that purpose. [snopes.com]
As for the "symbol of consumerism" - sadly, I can't say that I was joking there.
Cause, he is either selling soda-pop, or promoting shopping.
And even at his pre-Coca Cola moral best, he was still a symbol of material rewarding for "being good".
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Well, depends on the people.
As a kid, I was VERY impressed by Bakshi's version which looks rather inferior today.
Still, despite all its flaws it still made loads of money.
Actually, buck-for-buck per minute of production, it was a grater success than the Jackson's trilogy.
But I digress. It was never about the money or technology - it is about the strength of the story.
And there usually isn't really that much of THAT going around in most tales aimed at small children.
Re:LOTR (Score:5, Interesting)
I've watched the Polar Express at least a dozen times (our 2 year old is really into trains at the moment). I think there is a problem with that movie besides just the rendering. Tom Hanks' acting was motion captured for practically every character, including the lead boy. Hanks has very specific mannerisms, and I don't think they were ideal for portrayal by CGI characters. For example, he does this stiff-necked type expression, where he keeps his neck stiff and rotates his whole torso part way towards the subject, then he looks at them out of the corner of his eyes (usually with a sort of bewildered expression). It's a very stiff motion, almost like he's wearing a neck brace. He does that several times in Polar Express, and it simply exacerbates the problem and makes the characters look more rigid and artificial. If anything they should have been slightly more articulate and dynamic to compensate for the negative expectations people would already have over the CGI.
I think it's also an issue of scaling. You can't just take an adult, have them pretend they are a child, scale them down to child-size, and have it look exactly right. The proportions and mechanics are wrong for one thing, besides the fact that kids naturally move and act like kids, and adults naturally act like adults.
Originally Hanks was even going to voice every single character, and voice affects would be applied to change the pitch, etc. In fact, there is a trailer floating around in which Hanks voiced the lead boy's voice, and it sounded horrible. I'm glad someone with enough clout was able to step in and convince Hanks otherwise without stepping on his toes too much. I think Polar Express demonstrated the same problem with the motion capture - everyone is drastically different in their motion and mannerism, and if you use one person to portray a dozen different people, then they will all look unnaturally similar. If your CGI movie has 5 lead roles, you need 5 people to act for motion capture, and 5 people to voice, and they should be cast just like for any "normal" movie. It's that simple.
Re:LOTR (Score:4, Insightful)
I think Polar Express demonstrated the same problem with the motion capture - everyone is drastically different in their motion and mannerism, and if you use one person to portray a dozen different people, then they will all look unnaturally similar.
I don't think that's a fundamental problem, I think that's a problem with choosing the wrong actor. There are actors that are very good at creating distinct characters through motion and mannerism, and there are actors that have a more limited palette of motion and mannerism. Either -- depending on how well they portray the feeling of a particular story -- can be great actors at playing one role in a piece, but only the former are likely to be successful playing multiple roles (unless they are supposed to have eerily-similar mannerisms) in the same piece -- whether its live action (as in a live "one man" show, or on film using camera tricks) or done via motion capture.
(The same thing that is true of motion and mannerism is true of voice acting; there are actors that can define distinct characters through voice alone, and actors that can't, and either can be good for one voice role in a piece.)
Re: Polar Express (Score:5, Informative)
The Polar Express seemed to have "rubbery" motion capture. I used to see this problem at trade shows like SIGGRAPH. The electromagnetic motion capture people would have a stage with a live dancer wearing sensors at her joints, and screens showing the CG character driven from the dancer. The CG character always moved worse than the live dancer. If the dancer did a hard stop, the CG character would show much less abrupt deceleration. That's because the electromagnetic systems were noisy, and had to be low-pass filtered.
There were also alignment problems. The hand positions were usually off. Metal in the area would distort the fields slightly. Around 2000 or so, errors of several inches were still common. I asked one of the demo dancers to touch her fingertips together, and the CG character was off by the breadth of a hand. The Polar Express animation had a similar slightly-off look.
This got better once motion capture started using multiple cameras at much higher frame rates than the animation. There's still some noise and filtering is still needed, but the noise is up at a few hundred Hz and the filters have higher cutoff frequencies. By the time the motion is downconverted to 24FPS, the effects of the filtering have disappeared.
Uncanny valley (Score:2)
Much as I enjoyed Tron: Legacy, young Flynn/Clu was just wrong enough to seriously creep me out. I think it was because some parts of his face didn't move right when he talked and smiled (cheeks and eyes).
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For me, it was his mouth that seemed way off. Somehow, the motion of the lips moving either seems to be off-sync with the sound, or exaggeratedly tight-lipped.
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Although the movie wasn't a tour de force, I thought the "creepiness" of Clu's facial expressions was actually a plus, because he was supposed to be creepy, he's the bad guy! The theme was the attempt by Flynn at perfection, and you can see that perfection isn't perfect in Clu's face. However, it probably would have been a better idea to use makeup and a little digital retouching in the initial scenes for young Flynn. Obviously Tron: Legacy was trying to show what current technology could do compared to
Yo mamma's so fat (Score:3, Funny)
Yo mamma's so fat, the recursive function calculating her mass density had a stack overflow.
The Polar Express (Score:2)
The Polar Express was a Cartoon (Score:5, Funny)
No reason to hate the puppets. But this does give some indication as to why Nancy Pelosi makes so many people uneasy...
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The uneasiness with Pelosi's look is the Deer-in-the-Headlights stare with the mechanical smile. You expect her to go postal when you turn your back.
Missing dimension (Score:5, Insightful)
Time. Consider our everyday conversations: "Ooh, he's creepy. He keeps looking at my stomach." "Look me in the eye and tell me that." "Watch that customer in the Jewelry department--he's got shifty eyes."
Examining static images of faces has limited (some, but limited) value. When we look at eyes, don't we immediately calculate *what they're looking at*? Much of our assessment of the character and intentions of people and animals seems to be based on how the eyes move.
You can't assess character (Score:2, Interesting)
You can't access character by watching a persons eyes or body language. That doesn't stop people from trying of course.
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Or as Shakespeare put it, "There's no art/To find the mind's construction in the face." That quote leaped to mind when I read your post.
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That's because most Autistics were burnt at the stake in Shakespeare's time.
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Did you mean "assess"? Otherwise your statement makes little sense to me. If you did, some people are REALLY good at assessing the average person's character by watching body language. I'm not good at it, but some are.
Of course, nobody can assess a sociopath''s character except a trained psychologist administering a test for the disorder.
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Of course, nobody can assess a sociopath''s character except a trained psychologist administering a test for the disorder.
Not necessarily so. The desire for political office, or any authority for that matter, is a pretty sure sign.
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But you can assess intentions. I wrestled in high school. Later as a coach, I could confidently instruct wrestlers to watch the opponents eyes, both in order to get an idea of their intentions and to never broadcast your move.
Someone's intentions give hints to their character.
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You can assess behavior and intent, however, which is much more important in the short term.
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"Ooh, he's creepy. He keeps looking at my stomach."
I'm actually looking at your breasts. You might consider wearing a bra once in a while
I thought people hated the Polar Express (Score:2)
because it wasn't that great of a film. The 3D wasn't terrible, but most folks I know really didn't care for the story.
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it's like they rolled a porcupine in botox and slapped the characters in the face with him; the mechanical monkey in "Toy Story 3" was more lifelike.
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Well, that's happens when you expand thirty or so lines of text into a ninety minute movie...
But seriously, the 3D *was* that bad. When characters opened their mouths, you could see the inside of their skulls, etc... etc...
Homocentric bullshit? (Score:5, Interesting)
My cats look directly and intently at my face every day, and it's obvious from the circumstances that they recognize that a mind with intent is attached to those eyes and they're eager to figure out what that intent might be (and whether it might adversely affect them). This is not at all a behavior exclusive to primates, much less humans. Presumably that means my cats would have hated The Polar Express, too. They're already annoyed by Tom Hanks' nasally voice.
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Face-watching is certainly not unique to humans, but the "uncanny valley" presumably is. Or if other species have a similar response, it's a lot harder to test.
We might well learn something if we could get a cat to respond to The Polar Express, but getting cats to do ANYTHING reliably in a behavioral study is a pain in the ass. You'd be better trying it on dogs.
For that matter, it would be interesting to see where the uncanny valley arises in observations of other species. Does can you get that creepy ef
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For researchers, the fact that dogs go nuts for treats is a bonus. You can use it as an incentive to participate in the experiment. As opposed to cats, who will generally just ignore everything going on around them, treats or no.
It can be done. It's just more work.
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How are dogs any better? From everything I've seen, they will do whatever gives them the most treats.
Compared to most animals who either run away from humans or try to attack the humans or they ignore the humans, dogs' understanding that "If I do what that human likes I might get a reward" is an intellectual achievement orders of magnitude superior to other species.
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You need to consider that scent is as almost a large part of a cat's perceptual universe as sight. Even the best CGI or robotic cat simulation won't have the scent.
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If my suspicion is correct then the only other animals which would experience a strong uncanny valley effect would n
Re:Homocentric bullshit? (Score:5, Insightful)
My cats look directly and intently at my face every day, and it's obvious from the circumstances that they recognize that a mind with intent is attached to those eyes and they're eager to figure out what that intent might be (and whether it might adversely affect them).
Dogs you mean. No other animal can beat dogs when it comes to reading the human mind. Most animals don't even know to look at where we are pointing at. Dogs have evolved with humans for the last 30,000 years. I posted earlier the theory about dog-human interaction could be the one that led to sedentism that was the precursor to the domestication of plants and agriculture. Someone asked for references. See Nicholas Wade's book "Before the Dawn" for a good over view of "The Great Leap Forward". (But the main thrust of that book was building inheritance trees of the Y Chromosome, the mitochondrial DNA, DNA of the body louse, the tree of languages etc and showing how they all agree with one another and gives us clues about fixing crucial dates before the recorded history. For example lactose tolerance and cattle domestication in west-central Europe about 8000 years ago. Or the correlation between horse based civilizations and Indo-Aryan language family. )
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/family/pets/8151924/Dogs-are-smarter-than-cats.html [telegraph.co.uk]
nova special (Score:3)
Re:mind with intent (Score:4, Insightful)
My cats look directly and intently at my face every day
Maybe your cats are just waiting for you to pass on so they can eat you? Actually, I do wonder what they are thinking at such times... maybe something as simple as love.
Re:mind with intent (Score:5, Informative)
They are attempting to calculate the best approach to getting fresh food in their bowl based on your mood and their own. Do they howl until you give in? A little mewl and a flick of the tail? A pur and flop next to the bowl so that you notice it is empty while giving a belly rub? That little head butt thing that says "you one of my people and thats cool with me"? Do they sit on your dinner plate? Do they walk up to a glass of grape juice, look you in the eye and then knock it onto the carpet?
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Cats love to try to stare you down. It's a game to them (and they hate losing).
Cats are far more intelligent than anyone gives them credit for.
Uncanny Valley Roadmap (Score:4, Insightful)
At the Mountains of Santa ... (Score:2)
But, but ... they *weren't supposed to look alive*
I suppose the story got a little fouled up in the editing, but here is a clip from the director's cut [whatisdeepfried.com]
I can agree (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm an eye person. It's what I love about chicks the most (but their soft curvy parts come in a close second).
But besides that, i can read people by looking in their eyes. Hard to explain, but if I make I contact with you, I connect to you somehow and can figure out what's going on inside.
That being said, it gives me the creeps as most people really, well, suck.
So if i'm looking at your cleavage when we talk, don't be offended, you don't want me to read what's going on in your head.
(you might think i'm
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Wow dude, totally TMI there.
Key to survival (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, I guess it'd be pretty important if the zombie uprising ever happens, or the world is taken over by sentient dolls.
I don't seem to have any trouble surviving. (Score:5, Informative)
I'm autistic. I don't seem to have the automatic distinction between things with minds and things without minds. In fact, I can occasionally forget that other people have minds, briefly. For instance, a couple of days ago, I was pinching Beloved Spouse's cheeks, and I suddenly got fascinated with how the various components of the face are connected and deform each other. I started messing with this. Suddenly it occurred to me: There is a person experiencing this, and it may not be a preferred experience. But there you have it; for a good four or five seconds, I had completely forgotten that my spouse was a sapient creature. While staring directly at said spouse's face.
I can't think of an occasion on which this has been any kind of survival problem. (My spouse is very forgiving.)
I suspect that it's useful to get this stuff automatically, but it also produces all sorts of strange buggy behavior when we find things that trigger the "that's people" grey matter but which aren't actually people.
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Wait, doing shit like that means you are autistic? I'm not sure that's right. Then again, I am occasionally seized by the certainty that the relative densities of thoughts in my skull produce surface-like tensions that can be bounced upon like a trampoline and also drown me... Anyhow, are you sure you aren't just a mental illn'iss'ist like the rest of us?
Relating back to the thread: based on my experience in a human skull our main concern should be not making any one thing both complex enough to fail as u
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No, diagnosis by doctors confirms you are. Just because he didn't say he has been diagnosed does not mean he hasn't. I would assume implication is that there is the diagnosis. Or are you thinking he is just bragging about being autistic?
art (Score:3)
There's simple artistic concerns as well beyond the math. Zemeckis and others need to sit down and understand why Pixar's hand crafted, "super deformed" characters come across as orders of magnitude more realistic than high tech attempts to directly dump humans into the computer. I've always felt if you want realistic humans just use actors, and CGI everything else.
How can they say (Score:4, Insightful)
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The other end of the scale is a picture of a real doll that looks similar to the initial real person head shot, from what I gathered.
eye contact is cultural (Score:2)
Other cultures have different rules on eye contact. In the second part of the study when they measured where people looked the most, the people were looking at the eyes. It's hardly surprising that if you make the bits that people focus on look more artificial, they think the whole model looks artificial.
If they had done this test in a different country where people don't make eye contact then the results might have been different.
I seem to cue off the wrong things (Score:2)
Looking at the example side by side comparisons at the top, I think I was latching onto the wrong changes. I think they were trying to push the geometry around a little, but what *actually* caught my eye was the ones on the right look like they have a lower poly count and lower res textures. Was that actually what they were trying for? If not, they would have made a better test by similarly de-resing the originals.
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Re:Survival? (Score:5, Interesting)
The study has nothing to do with the point you are making. There is no real world situation where we encounter Polar Express level-of-competence simulacra and our life is threatened if we make an incorrect decision. Claiming "survival," let alone it being "key" to survival, is sloppy thinking by researchers who have apparently internalized some evolutionary pyschology memes.
This ability is presumably a side effect of other valuable mental skills, such as the ability to read facial expression and identify similar looking faces. Which is amazing and the subject of not much study, but no what this article is about and not what the experiment measured.
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True or not, this hypothesis does bring another experiment to my mind - at what point do people suffering from prosopagnosia [wikipedia.org] not consider a face a face anymore? I.e. the same experiment but conducted with people who cannot recognize faces.
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The severity of my facial blindness is still to be studied in a laboratory environment, but I's around where I sometimes cannot follow the plot in a movie since two main characters might look "the same" to me just because the cues I normally use, facial hair, hair style, movement etc are too similar in some of the scenes.
With that said, I'd happily go along with "67%" in the videos from the article, and thus there doesn't seem to be a difference at least for me.
Re:Survival? (Score:5, Informative)
There is no real world situation where we encounter Polar Express level-of-competence simulacra and our life is threatened if we make an incorrect decision
Today, yes.
In evolutionary past... there are lots of illnesses that cause people's minds to degrade (animal minds, too). The most common one that comes to mind is rabies [cdc.gov], which also makes people and animals [peteducation.com] move in a somewhat zombielike, jerky fashion.
In the modern world, identifying a rabid animal isn't quite as needed, since vaccinations have helped to slow the spread of the disease via "herd immunity" even to the "wild", feral animals that live in many cities and urban areas. Go back a century or more, on the other hand, and identifying it early - in livestock, working dogs, and wild animals - was a much more necessary skill. Hell, identifying an infected food animal is important so as not to eat it.
And then there's African trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness), leprosy, Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob, transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (aka "kuru", "laughing sickness"), and other "prion" diseases.
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None of these illness you mention has anything to do with recognizing human faces and distinguishing them from animals.
Nor does the most rabid or schizophrenic person look anything other than human.
You are conflating unusual, illness-induced behavior with the purported claim in this article, that distinguishing human from seemingly human was a key to survival.
For every
"you could look in his eyes and tell he was crazy"
there are dozens and dozens of
"he was the nices
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The point GP is making is that many of those diseases cause people or animals to act/move/look slightly "off", and noticing that was key to avoiding them and avoiding infection. The rabid person doesn't look normal. It's not so much a physical thing, it's a behavior thing which still plays into "appearance". It's perfectly natural that a revulsion reaction would be an evolutionary defense for this.
Likewise computer animations are often slightly "off" in the same way - the muscle groups may not work together
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The ability to identify similar faces is important for survival -- the survival of your genes.
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Define "similar faces".
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It's hard to define, which is why computers aren't very good at it. Nonetheless, we can generally see physical characteristics of ourselves in both our parents and our offspring [google.com]. If "your child" doesn't look like you, there's a good chance you've been cuckolded.
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There's a brain disorder that causes people to be unable to recognize human faces. I wonder if the uncanny valley effect works on them, because clearly they are missing that survival function that you noted.
Prosopagnosia (Score:4, Informative)
It's called prosopagnosia. And yes, the uncanny valley works on them. They can see if something is human or not.
What they can't do is decide who the face they see belongs to. Al least not without detailed study of said face.
"Hmm, I see blue eyes with large lashes. A nose with some large pores. The chin is somewhat pointy. I'm guessing this is Jennifer. Oh wait, she wears the same shoes that Jennifer wore three months ago. Yes, I think it might very well be her."
Not exaggerated either.
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Wow. That definitely deserves a top spot in the Big List of Awkward Things to Say Out Loud While Having Sex.
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Wow. That definitely deserves a top spot in the Big List of Awkward Things to Say Out Loud While Having Sex.
"Hmm, I see blue eyes with large lashes. A nose with some large pores. The chin is somewhat pointy. I'm guessing this is Mom."
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"Prosopagnosia (sometimes known as face blindness) is a disorder of face perception where the ability to recognize faces is impaired, while the ability to recognize other objects may be relatively intact. The term originally referred to a condition following acute brain damage, but recently a congenital form of the disorder has been proposed, which may be inherited by about 2.5% of the population. The specific brain area usually assoc
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the Cambridge Face Memory Test [faceblind.org] was an eyeopener for me.
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Just like most white people can't tell Chinese people apart, those with prosopanosia can't tell anybody apart.
At least, that's what I was told once. It makes sense to me that the underlying brain mechanisms could be related.
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I can tell you from personal experience that the Uncanny Valley effect works just fine. It's not so much an "inability to recognize human faces" as an inability to distinguish between faces, especially similar-looking faces. For example, I have no trouble telling that Barack Obama is not the same perso
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Maybe survival, but wouldn't you think that anything registering "close enough" wasn't too dangerous to spend more time looking at, and anything that wasn't human would be immediately recognizable? I don't think anyone's going to mistake a cheetah for a person. One says "possible friend" and the other says "you're dead before you realize it's a cheetah"
I was thinking the same thing.
Unless they were watching "The Walking Dead" or "Fringe" on the day they wrote that, I simply see no reason to make such a claim.
There has never been a time when people needed to recognize another animal as dangerous but at the same time run the risk of mistaking it for human.
Similarly, there has historically been far more risk to humans from other humans, (some indistinguishable from one's own clan) than from any animals.
So perhaps they meant it the other way around; suggestin
Re:Or Beowulf (Score:5, Interesting)
Scott McCloud has a fairly good chapter on this in his book, Understanding Comics. He demonstrates drawing-space as a three-variabled continuum, a triangle. It's been a while, but I think the points were something like complexity, abstractness, realism. But the crux of the matter was, the simpler the approximation, the more we could associate ourselves in that role, so it became more emotionally immersive. Dory and Nemo's dad were very simplified, abstractified, so we related better.
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"But the crux of the matter was, the simpler the approximation, the more we could associate ourselves in that role,"
Peanuts. Calvin and Hobbes, xkcd.
Re:Or Beowulf (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly. We don't have any problem seeing emotional life-likeness in even very schematic comic characters, plush animals, and occasionally even objects that don't have a face at all. I'm willing to bet if tomorrow very strange aliens descended from the sky, having totally un-earthlike features, we would still connect with them emotionally without a problem, because we can learn to interpret non-human reactions and features. Yet somehow human characters that are "not quite right" irritate us.
Since even clearly perceived falseness doesn't trip us up at all when interacting with non-human characters, I hypothesize that the uncanny valley could actually be caused by a visual subsystem that deals with recognizing sickness and death in humans, triggering an involuntary repulsion that then is rationalized after the brain realizes it has this reaction mainly when looking at dolls. People do appear to have associations with death as they jokingly described the Polar Express as something reminiscent of a zombie movie. This is probably also the reason why zombie movies (where the undead don't look like live people with excessive makeup) are so effective. That legless zombie girl in "The Walking Dead" pilot creeped me out to no end...
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Animators spend a lot of time and effort making animals and inanimate objects more human. Animators are great at boiling down human emotions, expressions, gestures, etc. into the most basic elements, while still being recognizable as such. It takes a great deal of skill in a very competitive field.
I'd say a better analogy would simply be cats and dogs. Very different; they don't smile, or laugh, but for the most part, neither have too much trouble getting their basic emotions across to their owners.
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That's a great example; even a great story can't hide shit animation. It's why I always get the Pixar movies for my daughter; they care enough to spend shitloads of rendering time on their content, they even invented the best tools in the industry to generate it with, and you know the story won't leave you flat. It's why I avoid any of the DreamWorks animations; shit animation from people who could give a crap about the art form, and lack-luster stories that do leave a lot to the imagination.
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Folks, watch out for a nefarious bleak future where computer generated faces are the new future. Because before you know it, you will roll over in bed and that computer face will be YOUR WIFE. Thanks for listening, and you all have a Merry Christmas.
It's a Christmas Miracle! I'm getting Married!
Sex-bots? (Score:2)
If this guy is talking about the coming revolution of sex-bots, count me in! I for one, would be happy to roll over in bed to find a robot. As long as she's cute and does what she's told.
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I don't have to see Jon Katz' face to know that he's not human.
Dude, you're having a bad flashback. It'll be OK soon, try to stay calm.