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Tag Archive for Uncanny Valley

Uncanny Environments

March 16, 2015 Videogames, Writing Comments Off on Uncanny Environments

 

I think Dying Light has nailed the urban environment.  It’s been coming for a while, every iteration, every game that comes out that has been set in an analog for a real world space has been taking baby-steps forward.  Watch Dogs nearly got it, the Modern Warfare games were as close as I’d ever seen up until that point, Max Payne had a toe over the line, but I think in Dying Light we finally have a believable urban environment to play with.

Why do I say this?  Because of all the *stuff*.

For long time (decades, really), if there was an object in your environment, it was useful.  Barrels?  You could blow those up.  Boxes?  Smash’em to get stuff.  But not any longer, in fact, the fact that “useful” objects are tagged with some kind of glow effect, or show up as actionable in your HUD is, in part, due to the fact that there is so much stuff in the world that you can’t find what you need unless we point your eyeballs at it.

In order to get an environment to look “real” it has to be dirty.  This is a problem that artists have beat their heads against over and over.  One of the things that made the model effects in Star Wars look so real?  The dirt, the grime, the grit in-between joints. Ever try to get “realistic textures” from in-service military vehicles?  Good luck, they keep those things *so* clean that, even though you are working from a photo of an actual tank, nobody ever believes it.

It’s the uncanny valley of environments, and I think we’ve finally climbed out.

 

The Illusion of Life

February 12, 2015 future, Writing Comments Off on The Illusion of Life

You’ve hear me opine (briefly) about the Uncanny Valley before.  That place where things look realistic, but it’s not the *right* kind of real and it makes out brains freak out a bit?  You’ve felt the effect, maybe a friend of yours had one of those realistic plush cats curled up on the sofa, or you ran across a street performer playing a very good game of statue.

You’ve seen this video before, it’s the one Boston Dynamics released to introduce their newer, smaller and lighter autonomous quadruped, “Spot”.  And interestingly enough, a whole lot of people on the internet were made uncomfortable when the robot got kicked to show off it’s re-balancing capability.  If you haven’t watched it yet, go ahead.

It makes you feel kind of bad, doesn’t it?  Even though it’s a robot, even though it looks nothing like a dog or a pony or a llama, you’re still just a bit outraged that that engineer would boot it so casually, and on ICE as well!

I’d posit that this critter just walked up out of the Uncanny Valley.  Not with regards to it’s looks, but with regards to the way it moves and reacts to the kick.  Our brains can register that it is scrambling, that those motions are being created ON THE FLY by the limited AI that drives the thing and so, to us, it has become just a little more “real”.

So if a robot that looks nothing like a living creature can still trip the circuits in our brain that say “it’s alive”, maaaaaaybe the Uncanny Valley effect isn’t so much about how a thing LOOKS, but rather about how it MOVES.