fuck. this is creepy

I wonder if animated actors will still become scientologists?

Maybe we're on the upswing (or the nadir) of the Uncanny Valley?

It doesn't creep me out as much as I thought it would. Are we past the uncanny valley now?

xp

It didn't freak me out at all, I mean, shit, we have Tom Cruise.

She is considered to be one of the first animations to have overleapt a long-standing barrier known as 'uncanny valley' - which refers to the perception that animation looks less realistic as it approaches human likeness.

http://www.randomtuesday.com/pictures/30rock/noway.gif

Oh. I didn't read the Youtube info section.

I think the uncanny valley is different for every person. By itself, the animation doesn't really freak me out that much. What's going to freak me out is when poopsockers start wanting to have sex with animations even more than they already do.

this freaks me out because of the lack of 'uncanny valley' characteristics.

bitch failed my voight-kampff in about 2 seconds

Consensus on the valley issue then

I think I must be uncannily sensitive to this shit because it really does bother the living hell out of me
Perhaps I am a replicant myself, designed specifically to be extraordinarily adept at picking out other replicants

2 seconds is generous actually

The right half of her mouth isn't animated properly. It's like those NHS stop smoking adverts with the fish hooks.

I wonder if I'm picking up on the absence of eye rattle?
Actual human eyes shake in the sockets to prevent a massive blind spot from appearing in the center of your vision where the optic nerve exits, I dunno if 24-16 FPS is enough to capture that motion or even approximate it as blur but these fuckin' robots ain't got it

Still - better than Alf.

maybe she had a stroke, asshole.

xp

At any rate, expect Arianne to get an update sometime soon maybe

haha, I was just going to say "Have you shagged Emily yet?"

OH MY GOD, SHE TALKS JUST LIKE A CHATBOT

"I don't know, what do you think?"

This was mostly not crepey until she turned into wires satan.

For some reason, the last 20 seconds or so of the video won't work for me.
Can someone sum it up? Does her head spin around?

"Can your girlfriend do..THIS?"

(xxpost) I thought the inadvertent blackface bit was o_O

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect

As Weizenbaum later wrote, "I had not realized ... that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people."

just like geirbot

im not so much creeped out by her as by real people who look that unconvincing

your cindy mccain lols here

You guys are picking this up on shitty youtube resolution? It didn't look any worse to me than any number of real youtube pixelfests.

impossiblefunky (3 minutes ago) Show Hide
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Emily = Natalie Portman with Down's Syndrome?

still looks fakey fake. give it a few years tho.

I swear to god if Cindy McCain's face ever suddenly flips into blackface for no discernable reason, I am running for the HILLS

still looks fakey fake. give it a few years tho.

-- tipsy mothra, Thursday, August 21, 2008 12:49 AM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

replicant!

seriously, i can't tell. if that all the accompanying stuff (the intro and the wireframe/blackface thingie) wasn't there i'd have no idea.

You guys are picking this up on shitty youtube resolution? It didn't look any worse to me than any number of real youtube pixelfests.

-- Oilyrags, Wednesday, August 20, 2008 11:00 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

^

seriously.

seriously, i can't tell. if that all the accompanying stuff (the intro and the wireframe/blackface thingie) wasn't there i'd have no idea.

-- latebloomer, Wednesday, August 20, 2008 8:00 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

you're kidding, right?

eyes + mouth aren't right.

still, pretty close!

nutz deep in the uncanny valley

i thought the eyes looked pretty convincing!

i mean, with the intro there, you're already being told this is fake so your mind instantly starts looking for the things that don't add up (and they're there, but aren't as obvious as they usually are with CG people). if this was just being presented as a woman giving an interview, i doubt most would notice because they weren't looking for it. not with the blurry youtube resolution anyway.

No, it's not perfect, or near-perfect. But at the same time, in 1998 this would have blown your mind. Some of the responses on this thread are like a 14 year old kid peeping some megababe having a pimple on her boob and being like "oh god, what a dog".

yeah it would've fooled me

No, in 1998 this would have repulsed me

tom I'll bet you got front-row seats for The Spirits Within

zing?

the individual expressions are pretty convincing. the transitions between them are not.

haha actually I did go see that in the theater, on a road trip from monterey to bumfuck texas - it was dumb and so was the advent children thing, but at least neither one is trying to be more than a highly detailed cartoon

trust me I make a point to check out all the digital backlot, motion capture/3D photorealistic animation stuff that comes out; I'm ready to be proven wrong, but until then, yargh, the shit people think is acceptable. "I, Robot" did itself a big favor making the robot a robot

I don't think the youtube animation is "acceptable". It's weird to think what acceptable AI is. I'm just saying it's surely close enough to fool my grandpa, and that's something.

no, you said it would have blown my mind in 1998.

That shit was a straight lie and you know it.

Z S otm

(btw I saw Final Fantasy in the theaters too. with my mom. so I have no right to zing.)

I guess it is weird to think what constitutes "acceptable" in this realm, though. I'll think about that some more and get back.

hehe, Tom, although I said "your", I didn't mean YOUR mind. I'm talking to the internet in general. Internet community, I think this would have blown your mind in 1998. I'm not sure how to blow Tom's mind in 1998!

you can't blow an internet hardman's mind. the internet hardman's mind blows you.

my point was that while i think this wouldn't pass muster on a movie screen or even regular broadcast tv, on pixelly ol' youtube it looks (comparatively) real, especially if your mind isn't being clued in advance to look out for all those signature "uncanny valley" characteristics.

yeah I do kinda wonder how I would feel about this vs. placebo under experimental rigor; the .gif of tracy morgan up there looks like it could almost be a tech demo of the U3 engine, for example (given: extremely small frame number, small pixel count)

that sorta public access tv community calendar background music makes it like 1.5 times as creepy

http://i28.tinypic.com/256sewy.gif

can technology replicate THAT

that is basically the face harrison ford forgot to make

The Face (I Forgot To Make)
Daryl Danielson
Can't Cry Hard Enough
Warner Bros., 1997

also fuck you this thread for making me refer to normal human being faces as "placebo"

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v679/gemstar82/gifs/spidey_dance.gif

take that, computers

this is creepier

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWmzlqH6x28

s1ocki do you remember the episode where they stay in a vacation cabin and get attacked by ninjas? that was my favorite.

If I hadn't been told she was an animation, and had been told she'd had botox, I would have believed it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYgLFt5wfP4&feature=related

Better quality. Click the "Watch in High Quality" link.

http://i26.photobucket.com/albums/c102/OfMarrow/specular.jpg

thanks! with the crisper resolution her face is a bit more noticeably "off". but still, impressive. at a glance you wouldn't really notice. what makes it semi-convincing is the background and the lighting i think.

the real giveaway, i think, is how the eyes seem to "float". though they look way better than that creepy Polar Express shit.

wait, is the background live action?

i r stoopid

http://technabob.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/emily_scan_cgi.jpg

I saw this the other day... is the whole thing mocap modelled from an actual actress? Call me fussy, but I'm less impressed that way; if they could come up with that level of animation from scratch without a human reference model THEN I'd be going WOAH.

She looks all starey.

Oh well xpost there you go.

emac1507 (1 hour ago)
I can't wait until i can take a shotgun to Emily. I wanna see if they modeled the inside just as well as the out.

wtf. :-(

If I hadn't been told she was an animation, and had been told she'd had botox, I would have believed it.

-- James Morrison, Wednesday, August 20, 2008 11:53 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

totally, the lack of movement in the cheeks was the biggest giveaway that something was amiss for me. also the frequency of blinking seemed too obviously calculated to happen at consistent intervals.

http://technabob.com/blog/2008/08/20/image-metrics-emily-facial-animation-blows-my-mind/

Using ICT’s special scanning system that can capture facial details down to the individual pore, the face of actress Emily O’Brien was transformed into a digital representation of herself, which could then be entirely machine-manipulated. A special spherical lighting rig captured O’Brien in 35 reference facial poses using a pair of high resolution digital cameras. The facial maps were then converted into 3D data using Image Metrics’ proprietary markerless motion capture technology.

Image Metrics then generated a new animation sequence and precisely superimposed it onto the live actress’ head.

i really thought at first the ENTIRE thing was CG, not just her face.

this will mean good things for Chris Cunningham videos

Hey good point!

The second half of this, the set of reactions, was much more convincing than the first half. The face looked off in a slight sense, but it didn't strike me as an animation necessarily, it just seemed off somehow.

i bet it's actually a dude

Emil

http://www.emilyobrien.net/

http://www.thesoapdispenser.com/images/gallery/jana-hawkes.jpg

The asymmetrical mouth animation is accurate.

A lot of 20/20 hindsight here. I thought she blinked like someone who was trying to remember to blink. But I'd have just taken her for a real person with tic-y blinking.

Where on that page is a "Watch in High Quality" link?

It's weird what you do and don't pick up on. For example, I thought at the time that footage of the Chinese Olympics "footprint" fireworks were fake, but completely failed to notice that they were meant to be footprints.

I was only puzzled that they could go off so perfectly...

you guys are going to wind up paying me so much money to help spot the hunter-killers

yes yes, yes we will

She's kind of overacting.

that's pretty impressive, even if they still don't have the mouth right.

bitch failed my voight-kampff in about 2 seconds

-- El Tomboto, Wednesday, 20 August 2008 22:38 (Yesterday) Link

Kind of wondering how many false positives you get, Tom.

what's the big deal, they already perfected this stuff a couple of years ago

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-GdiIYI-iA

Whatever that last thing was, I'm really glad I had the sound turned off. Weept

I've watched it a couple of times now, and she's definitely starting to look more real.

I don't think I'm going to watch it anymore. Blugh.

she blinks too much

Before I got to the part about there being a real actress, I was going to say, "The fakiest part of the animation is that she talks and acts like not-very-discerning guys think that a girl who likes them will act. Strikes me as a fake-acting B-movie actress." In retrospect: Hah.

j0hn what the fuck is that

OMG shaye saint john!! hadn't seen that in years!

j0hn i am terrified of the internet now wtf

oh it's awesome. i think a friend of mine actually ordered the SSJ DVD's. i gotta borrow those.

now somebody go dig up that creepy little person with the dead eyes tap dancing

OMG j0hn's lady reminds me so much of the Max Headroom broadcast takeover guy.

...

http://i37.tinypic.com/vondj9.gif

http://s1m0ne.com/1sheet/simone-movie-poster.jpg

Trayce OTM upthread - if this was genereated completely from scratch, I'd be far more shocked. But they've just captured a real person speaking and then digitally copied her face pixel for pixel. Meh.

You reach down and you flip the tortoise over on its back, Leon.

I was gonna say, I thought they did a great job with her shirt.

BUT I HAVE BEEN DUPED. A lot.

For some reason, I'm reminded of this girl, whose affect I find utterly creepy somehow (especially at about 0:19 into the second video).

I think she reminds me of that character in Naked Lunch who says "Wheee!" all the time.

http://img225.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=90817_aaargh_122_437lo.JPG

<a href="http://img225.imagevenue.com/img.php?loc=loc437&image=90817_aaargh_122_437lo.JPG"; target=_blank><img src="http://img225.imagevenue.com/loc437/th_90817_aaargh_122_437lo.JPG"; border="0"></a>

Oh, I give up.