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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 being funny, but i'm not, i'm being serious. I don't like be touched either.)
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...
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:5, Interesting)
That's because he was 25% CGI and 75% Andy Serkis.