10 June 2014

Beyond the Uncanny Valley

Graphics specialists are closing in on one of their field’s longest-standing and most sought-after prizes: an interactive and photo-realistically lifelike digital human. Such a digital double will change the way we think about actors, acting, entertainment, and computer games. In movies, digital doubles already replace human actors on occasion, sometimes just for moments, sometimes for most of a feature film. Within a decade or so, computer-game characters will be as indistinguishable from filmed humans as their movie counterparts. And in time, this capability will help bring movies and games together, and out of the union will come entirely new forms of entertainment. This blurring of the real and the digital became possible in movies recently when moviemakers reached a long-anticipated milestone: They crossed the ‘uncanny valley’. The term has been used for years to describe a problem faced by those using computer graphics to depict realistic human characters. When these creations stopped looking cartoonish and started approaching photo-realism, the characters somehow began to seem creepy rather than endearing. Some people speculated that the problem could never be solved; now it has proved to be just a matter of research and computing power.


Producing a fully realistic digital double is still fantastically expensive and time-consuming. It’s cheaper to hire even George Clooney than it is to use computers to generate his state-of-the-art digital double. However, the expense of creating a digital double is dependent on the costs of compute power and memory, and these costs will inevitably fall. Then, digital entertainment will enter a period of fast and turbulent change. An actor’s performance will be separable from his appearance; that is, an actor will be able to play any character—short, tall, old, or young. Some observers also foresee a new category of entertainment, somewhere between movies and games, in which a work has many plotted story lines and the viewer has some freedom to move around within the world of the story. Creators of entertainment also dream that technology will someday make itself invisible. Instead of painstakingly using cameras and computers to share their visions, they hope to be able to directly share the rich worlds of their imaginations using a form of electronic mind reading far more sophisticated than the brain-scan technology of today. That magic means not only being able to step inside a realistic virtual world without the cumbersome head-mounted screens that create virtual experiences today.

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