Computer animation treks across the "uncanny valley"

If it weren't for the introductory warning on this video of "Emily" which assures you that "Emily is not real" you might not think something was amiss. But sure enough, Emily is a computer animation, created by a company called Image Metrics.

According to a profile in the Times Online, Image Metrics is pioneering a new way of approaching the complex task of recreating the way that human facial features move to make for better, more realistic computer animations in both movies and video games. When animators get close, but not close enough, they enter a region called the "uncanny valley," in which animated figures look like mannequins or zombies. Getting across the uncanny valley has proven very difficult to date, as it requires a rare combination of raw processing power and artistic talent to put together something that can fool the skeptical human eye.

Image Metrics' approach is to break facial movements down into minute parts, something akin to isolating each muscle in the face so it can be managed independently. Per Image Metrics' COO Mike Starkenburg, "Ninety per cent of the work is convincing people that the eyes are real. The subtlety of the timing of eye movements is a big one. People also have a natural asymmetry—for instance, in the muscles in the side of their face. Those types of imperfections aren't that significant but they are what makes people look real."

Emily is definitely the closest we've come to getting across the uncanny valley, but she hasn't made it all the way to photo-realism. (Chipmaker AMD says that kind of power won't be around until 2020.) As Starkenburg notes, it's ultimately the eyes that give it away: They're a little too big, or something.... it's hard to put a finger on it. The shape of the mouth isn't perfect, either. Like the teeth are too big. The weird thing about looking at these animations is that the better they get, the more you obsess over the smallest details. Even in a tiny video that's just a few hundred pixels wide, your eye immediately seeks out what's "wrong" about a face. Blow that up to the size of a movie theater screen and the effect is massively amplified. (The same thing happened with The Lord of the Rings' Gollum, who looked pretty cool in still photos, but who never moved quite the right way on the big screen. Imagine how much better he'd look today...) Still, the overall effect is amazing. We're still in the uncanny valley, but we're well on our way across it.

Image Metrics isn't some theoretical research outlet, it's a big player in the business (it did the animation for Grand Theft Auto IV), so it's almost certain that this kind of technology is going to end up in video games somehow, and probably sooner than you'd think.

LINK: Lifelike animation heralds new era for computer games