Uncanny valley theory refers to a gap in emotional response to humanoid robots and CGI characters. There’s a point where people feel creeped out by near-realistic human fakes when they take on an almost real but not-quite-right look. Think corpses, or zombies.
That valley may have been crossed by computer graphics company Image Metrics. They’ve recently released a mind blowing video sample that demonstrates their new facial animation technology. In a nutshell, they record movements of a human actor, and can replicate and control facial micro-movements down to the pixel.
The Times reports:
Researchers at a Californian company which makes computer-generated imagery for Hollywood films started with a video of an employee talking. They then broke down down the facial movements down into dozens of smaller movements, each of which was given a ‘control system’.
The team at Image Metrics – which produced the animation for the Grand Theft Auto computer game – then recreated the gestures, movement by movement, in a model. The aim was to overcome the traditional difficulties of animating a human face, for instance that the skin looks too shiny, or that the movements are too symmetrical.
“Ninety per cent of the work is convincing people that the eyes are real,” Mike Starkenburg, chief operating officer of Image Metrics, said.
“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.”
Times Online: “Lifelike animation heralds new era for computer games”
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