The Uncanny Valley of the senses.
I attended a talk today titled the Uncanny Valley of Eeriness. It went a little too fast for me, especially the bit about the mirror neurons. I know what they do, sure, they effectively facilitate the emulation of action in human beings and apes between one another. (I hope I’m not off the mark, that’s what I think they are, grossly simplified. I’m sure they’re effects are far reaching) The talk made me feel optimistic about the application of CG in life, in general. Beyond entertainment. The emerging technologies, especially Microsoft’s touch table, the one you can interact with, download music from and pay your bills with? That is just great. And the holographic display, amazing piece of technology. There were a lot of other technologies that dealt with very tactile experiences as well. It’s technology that’s striving to be intuitive, which is great. Because unless things are intuitive -or at least can be easily learnt- they won’t go very far, I think. I guess what I’m hoping for is that CG will allow us a broader spectrum for communication, one beyond visuals into the other realms of the senses we’re endowed with.
The uncanny valley of eeriness talked a lot about our ability to form a theory of mind, and how we’re very sensitive to faces that look kind of reeal, but not totally real. From what I gather, it’s like, if a face is very abstracted, say like, most cartoon characters, we fill in the detail that is not added in our minds. So we’re okay with that. But if you give us too much detail, but not enough to be real, we don’t like that, because what’s missing becomes really glaring. Whereas in the super abstracted caricature, we are willing to suspend our disbelief knowing that oh, it’s a caricature after all.
There was also this great theory/proposition put forward, that we see the inability to effectively communicate with facial expressions as a disease. It wasn’t quite put that way, but the way she said it was, well, we’re really freaked out when someone of our species gets sick, because we know it can be transfered onto us. But if say, a plant gets ill, we’re not too worried, because we’re so distantly related. So perhaps thats why if a CG character is very abstract and does not have sophisticated facial expressions, we’re okay. But if it’s striving to be relatively realistic, and does not quite cut it, we’re not.
Ah well. Anyway, another party. Time to shower, get an ice cream an GIhardelli’s and walk in the sunshine to the Marriot. Oh sweet.