Bukimi No Tani
If you’ve seen Beowulf:The Movie or Final Fantasy:The Spirits Within, the ‘Uncanny Valley’ needs no introduction. Proposed by Masahiro Mori some thirty years ago, the valley is what happens when you encounter something closely resembling a human but it misses the mark in such a way that it triggers repulsion.
I remember how excited people were about the Final Fantasy movie. Everything seemed so lifelike, some even speculated that real life actors may soon be out of a job. (By the way, when people start making apocalyptic comments like that, I always get sceptical). As people sat through the film, this annoyance of the just-less-than-real CG caused a reversal. People stopped finding the movie awe-inspiring, and just started to find it repulsive. The acting and the writing were not bad, but the emotional content of the movie really required you to care deeply about the characters. This is much harder when you’re constantly comparing what you see to the real thing. People are very good at facial recogniton, and spend most of their days practicing it, so when you come across something trying to trick you, you can’t suspend disbelief. And if you think you’re looking at corpse, even subconsciously, what else should you be feeling but repulsion?
Alan Turing came up with a test to define if a computer had finally achieved human-like intelligence. You sit with, say, a text messaging device, and you can comunicate with two contacts: a person and a computer, but you are not told which contact is the machine. If, over the course of your conversation with the two, you cannot tell which is the real person, and which is the machine, that machine can be justifiably deemed intelligent. I think something like this might be the only way to get past the Uncanny Valley.
If, while watching a movie, you can’t tell which characters are human, and which are CG, the game and film industries will have finally clawed its way out of the valley. Until then, however, I don’t think there are any simple technical tricks which will be able to prevent this very natural response to facsimile faces.