From: Michael M. Butler (butler@comp-lib.org)
Date: Wed May 15 2002 - 09:24:53 MDT
Salient, fascinating point from
"Why Is This Man Smiling? Digital animators are closing in on the complex
system that makes a face
come alive." by Lawrence Weschler--
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.06/face.html
Excerpt:
<<
Such visions, however, raise a further question, and in some senses the very
question with which we began: Is such an ambition even conceptually
possible? Will anyone ever be able to digitally replicate a human soul?
"Ah," responds Smith, "now you're getting into the question of consciousness
itself. I, for one, think we are explainable, and I am unwilling to invoke
God or some other vitalistic force to get there. It's a matter of religion
with me. Now," he continues, "whether we can get there - 'there,' in this
case, meaning the creation of an entirely convincing, feature-length
live-action film made up of entirely digital actors - I don't know. We may
yet encounter some sort of conceptual roadblock along the way."
The great Japanese engineer and roboticist Masahiro Mori (author, among
other things, of The Buddha in the Robot) may already have foreseen that
roadblock with his notion of the Uncanny Valley. While contemplating the
coming evolution of robots, he pointed out the way we can quite readily
empathize with a robot that's, say, 20 percent humanlike, and even more so
with a robot that's 50 percent, and even more still with a robot that's 90
percent - indeed, you can plot out a rising slope of anthropomorphizing
empathy. From Mickey Mouse through Shrek, say. But somewhere beyond 95
percent, Mori hypothesizes, there's a precipitous drop-off into the Uncanny
Valley. When a replicant is almost completely human, the slightest variance,
the 1 percent that's not quite right, looms up enormously, rendering the
entire effect somehow creepy and monstrously alien.
Andy Jones, Final Fantasy animation director, makes a similar point, arguing
that, while a completely convincing replication of a human being had never
been his team's goal, he, too, had noticed how "it can get eerie. As you
push further and further, it begins to get grotesque. You start to feel like
you're puppeteering a corpse." Similarly, PDI/DreamWorks' Lucia Modesto
noted that her team had to pull back a little on Princess Fiona: She was
beginning to look too real, and the effect was getting distinctly
unpleasant.
Can that Valley be traversed? Well, even Mori portrays it as a valley,
rising sharply back up on the other side as it approaches 100 percent
similitude. I started working on this story convinced that it couldn't be
crossed (it's a matter of religion with me, too). And yet ...
>>
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