Heavy Rain in the "Uncanny Valley" [update 1]

I couldn't watch the entire thing because that video creeped me out. For a second I imagined that everyone around me here at work looked like that and I almost had a heart attack.

There is no need for this ultra realistic stuff. We cannot get it right and all these things are gonna enter the uncanny valley. Thats why I loved FFVII: Advent Children so much. The details and animation was there but they clearly made in anime-like. I always hated stuff like dolls and manequins. ugh!

Wow, ok when i first watched it i shared identical thoughts to most of you however. Try watching it again only this time mute the volume. The facial expressions come across much much better that way.

I agree, the body language & her body movement as she walks to the kitchen sink etc looked very 'life like'. The face seems OK until she smiles, Jesus its scary. Its also a bit creepy the way her mouth doesn't move right when she talks. Despite that she looks more 'Real' than Micheal Jackson.

I was dissapointed she didn't pull the trigger ;)

Definitely needs work. The rendering is very high quality, but the facial animation is poor compared to Half-Life 2, or even something like Oblivion (which looks slightly creepy at times, but at least they don't look like they're going to unhinge their jaw and swallow you whole ala Tony Robbins in Family Guy). I found myself almost forgetting she was digital in certain parts though. And I love the last line in the cutscene.

I like where David Cage and Quantic Dream are *trying* to get to - I appreciate what they're trying to accomplish, and while I don't want all my games to be essentially interactive cutscenes, I do think there's a good place for them. But my first thought when I heard of a sequel to Indigo Prophecy was "Will things be less... cruddy?" There are just bizarre things about that game that make me scratch my head and make me wonder WTF Cage was thinking - the ending chief among them (I mean seriously, it was a little odd, but they had me up until Lucas fell), but Tyler just seemed stereotyped to an extreme (not in any really offensive way), and some sequences just felt thrown in to extend the game (boxing, basketball, dancing, etc.). The other thing that really disappointed me was how the music was used - the soundtrack was absolutely haunting and absorbing... but looped terribly in certain areas, came in in the middle of tracks, and it often felt as if the same three tracks were being used over and over again.

Essentially I think Indigo Prophecy was a flawed experiment - very interesting to look at and see what they did right, but more interesting to see what could've been better. I look forward to seeing if Cage and Quantic Dream learn from their experiences, or if they basically just do Indigo Prophecy 2 With Freaky People.

I'm not going to say it's perfect because it isn't, but calling this ugly is missing the point, if you listen to it she says she never gets the part because she doesn't look right as an actress, and as a game character she's not an idealised Lara Croft or Chun Li, while I'm sure the vast majority of readers would hit that in real life, by our inflated standards she's ugly.

Still as someone else said, the facial animation isn't as consistent as Half Life 2's and using motion capture for an entire scene doesn't prove anything, for it to be a real innovation animation it has to be interactive and seamless. The eyes need work but the teeth are meant to be over prominent, the actresses voice is affected by the overbite, so why should the game model have it removed.

This has nothing to do with the "Uncanny Valley", It is simply a case of bad animation. Nothing more, nothing less.

Yup, I think "animated blow-up doll" is pretty much the perfect description.

I much prefer quality art direction in a stylized environment to talking manequins like this.

The gaping mouth and clumsy voice reminded me of Marlee Matlin, which would be tolerable if she were intended to be deaf. But the animation is awkward. I know it's impractical to keyframe everything, but until some magical program comes along that automatically generates convincing shifts in weight and expression, tedious key framing is the only way to go. On another note, Richard Williams' "The Animaor's Survival Kit" is only about 20 dollars on Amazon, so this sort of ignorance of what works well in animation is inexcusable. As many have already pointed out, all the realism in the world won't make for a convincing or expressive character. The whole 'corpse marionette' thing is just creepy and speaks volumes of how inadequate the animators are.

Its nice to see Michael Jackson back in video games. Looks like he grew his hair out a bit.

Ugh...Darren
The Uncanny Valley is precisely what you just said.

When believable graphics meets unbelievable animation, or vise versa.

I'm not sure the tools are out there yet for believable fatial animations...The face is just too complex. There is so much more going on in the faces of people other than the mechanics of speech. There is a reason why people say that the eyes are the window to the soul, because sometimes just a look from someone can say everything. HL2 was good, but still very far outside of reality.

I'd be as bold as to say that once animators and game creators have figured out how to animate a face in a completely believable way, then they've reached the absolute pinnacle of what digital animation can do.

I can see how the uncanny vally _can_ be a problem, but how come this video gives you the creps when the final fantasy films are fine? Don't tell me the graphics are better on heavy rain then on theese film??

Perhabs the problem isint "uncanny vally" but actualy it has to to with the fact that creating good cgi is harder and involves more diciplines then a traditional game artist have?

WHOA! Indigo Prophecy sequel? I hardly even care about the picture or anything, but the next Indigo Prophecy is PS3 only? Huge bummer for me...

#59
There are subtile diferences...
First off this scene is a lot closer to what one may encounter on a daily basis. Where as you go into final fantasy expecting to be taken away from reality. This character is made in the image of a real person, the face and hands are probably images taken from the model applied to this character.
The closer something is to being real the more the slightest aspects will stand out.

This is just a tech demo but the acting was pretty solid. The charcter seemed belivable for the most part and carried through the emotion pretty well. Most of the movements done were fluid and realistic. Which shows just how much the ingame models have advanced. As to some of the smaller details may just not be possible in a realtime environment at the moment.


To me it just seemed as tho the lip synking is just not complete. I'm sure some of the hilights and things will also be wored out by the time of release.

The question to me now is how much of that was actually intentional. Having seen his other work...

Just like there is a place for various stylazation and exaduration there is as much of a place for realism. Indigo prohcey did a pretty good job at getting you belivable characters. Coupling that with being able to create a more visualy realistic character it can be a powerfull tool. As someone before me mentioned, it can really impact your decision within a game.(but it takes a bit more to it than just visuals to get you there)

Funny. I read the comments for the same movie on another gaming news site, but that site played up how awesome the movie was, not how horrible. All of the comments afterwards continued to talk about how awesome it was.

It's not a surprise, but just keep that in mind: most comments following a story will echo the original post's tone.

Until I saw the pic of Aurelie, I assumed they were going for Teri Hatcher and wound up with Shelley Duvall.

@ 45: You are wrong. They didn't grab the ugliest frame. This is the ugliest frame:
http://img356.imageshack.us/my.php?image=heavyrain4pe.jpg (this is just before she says "god it sounds so stupid")

I personally think a lot of you are exaggerating it a little bit. It's not THAT bad. The lip-syncinc is a little bad, the fingers are wrong, the hair is wrong, but overall it looks very convincing. All the emotions come across. And it doesn't freak me out...

pretty creepy to watch, especially at work with no sound >_>

The hyper-realism stuff... or even just trying-realism stuff like this just looks weird, unsettling visually, even without the animaions (the screenshot made me go :/ before I even watched the clip). I'd take wind waker and okami over this stuff anyday

Man, that stuff looks awful. It's why I don't understand why so many people are trying to hard to create lifelike graphics when you can go with something that looks slightly less real but leaps and bounds more believable.

The game I think had the best looking characters and emotions? Suikoden III. What really caught me in that one was how they used loy poly faces and just kept swapping the textures on them. It worked extraordinarily well. NPCs would be engaged in coversation in the foreground and you could see their eyes actually move and focus attention onto their conversation partner. Nothing Square or Bungie or Konami or anyone else has been able to convey emotions that well without making me think, "Ok, that looks off."

The worst offenders are sport games. Every single NBA Live has characters with the glazed unfocusing eyes, and as I understand it, the Maddens are that way, too. Makes me laugh every time.

Mom? How'd you get in that video!?

And why did you run away in the first place? D':

The bad animation I can deal with... Her voice, however, is another story.

wow. that was awesome. thanks for linking me to that, joystiq. you know, you don`t always have to criticize something in order to talk about it.

The reason this animation looks so creepy is because on a large scale (general body and head movement and vague facial expression), it's quite realistic. But the subtleties (lip movements, fingers, etc.) are way off. That's because this is an example of complete unrefined motion capture. The mo-cap equipment they're using isn't capable of capturing subtle facial animation (which is why even high-tech mo-cap studios always do a separate mo-cap session for facial and other detail capture (like fingers)).

And THAT is what's fucking missing from video games.

I absolutely hate when I play a really story-driven game and all the characters have horrible lines delivered by half-assed actors. We get stuck with 'Quite Mercenary Guy', 'Kooky Japanese Sidekick guy', 'Happy-Go-Lucky Girl in love with you', and the many other all too familiar video game personality cleches.

This girl had her own personality. You could connect with what she was saying, even if it was too soap opera-esce. We don't get emotion like that enough because the bar is already set so low. Why create a truly interesting character when you can use the standard 'Badass Hero Guy'?

I understand the difference when you're playing Mario or Jack and Daxter, but in a game like Metal Gear Solid or Final Fantasy I'd say the plot is actually the most important part. Yes, even more so than gameplay.

And no, I'm not that kind of person that wants to erase the line between video games and movies. I just think we need this kind of thing A LOT more often. I honestly think it's one of the main reasons video games aren't accepted by everyone as a major medium.

If you seen the Final Fantasy movies, you know that technologically we can make graphics that look a lot more human. I don?t know of too many that were freaked out by those characters. They have such a high level of detail to where it makes it more of a curiosity than repulsion. The problem is that we simply don?t have the processing power to do that in real time. We have the power to render a high polygon model with high resolution textures, but controlling it is another story. So they create shortcuts to simulate the animation both for the purpose of ease of development and conservation of processor cycles. With each shortcut the realism fades away slightly. What looked like a photorealistic still render now looks like a grotesque automaton when seen in motion. Unfortunately this generation of consoles will have a lot of characters like this, simply because this is the evolution of computer generated characters. We?ll have to wait until the future generations of consoles to have enough power to produce realistic people.

"Ugh...Darren
The Uncanny Valley is precisely what you just said."

Eric, I think you don't understand what the Uncanny Valley originally was used to describe. The origin of the term is used in robotics. It states that as robots get more human-like, the emotional response of people increases, but there is a point where they can become too life-like and the emotional responses fall drastically.

However in this particular instance, nothing about this video falls into that category, even if you extend the theory to include videogame graphics. There are plenty of other games that are using much more life-like human models and animation, yet still manage to retain the emotional response they are trying to get.

The reason this video looks bad, is because it is bad. Not because it's more realistic. That is the opposite of the Uncanny Valley principle.

Haha, the first thing that came to mind after watching this was...to be honest, it was "Holy fuck that was cool", but right after that I thought "Uncanny Valley lol". SEE URL 4 PRUF

I disagree; I think it -does- fit the criteria for the uncanny valley, at least to a degree. The key point is this: If the woman were -less- lifelike, if she were more stylized and abstracted, then the flaws in the animation probably wouldn't create such a feeling of uneasiness and repulsion. It's -because- she seems at least somewhat believable that the parts that come across "wrong" stand out so strongly.

It's also worth noting that Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was a huge failure. Though part of that probably has to do with the sub-par plot, if you look at most of what's been written about it, most critics will cite the characters, describing them in terms like "spectacularly undead".

Finally, there's a lot of interesting neuroscience stuff that ties into this, mostly dealing with how people perceive facial expression. For instance, as I understand it, the eyes are constantly making tiny movements, even though you consciously perceive them as being still. On a -subconscious- level, however, your brain recognizes these movements, and when you see eyes that -aren't- doing that, it comes across as the creepy "doll-eyed stare" that you sometimes see in animation like this.

Colour me impressed. I loved Inidigo Prophecy (actually, I imported a copy of Fahrenheit to Canada). I found the story engaging, and while some of the gameplay gimmicks got tired towards the end, generally felt the game was really well done. Not every game has to be an interactive movie - but I really miss them. I played all the classics - the later Wing Commanders, all the Tex Murphy games from Access, even one-offs like Black Dahlia. They were all great for their time, but I felt that Indigo Prophecy took things a step further. The excellent voice acting and intruiging story obviously helped.

I can't wait for Hard Rain. This was just a tech demo; lip synch can only improve over time. But I really got sucked in even by this short piece - the music, mood, motion capture movements, more excellent voice acting. Well done, Mr. Cage. Keep up the good work - and please, this time there's no need to neglect your family to finish the game. While I certainly appreciated Fahrenheit, just release Hard Rain when it's done. But please release it!

if you wanna see how professionals do it.. check out FF: Advent Children..

this PS3 demo is about 3 years behind the Square team

it was really sucking in the beginning, but I actually liked the ending, like, where she starts to cry, the action becomes some of the best I've seen in video games, in my opinion.

yeah actually... I really didn't like advent children or ff7 tech demo character models/animations either. The dull lifeless thing can be sufficiently agumented by the anime-type animations and expressions I'm familiar with but... I'd still prefer improvements in the 2-d and 3-d stylized animation space than the 3-d photorealism one.

#45: Oh. I was wondering about the accent. She sounded slightly Hispanic at points, oddly.

"I agree that it's a shame that Joystiq focused only on the most negative aspect of the video."

But that's the whole point! I was merely trying to point out that no matter how good you think the video looks compared to previous efforts, to many people it'll look freaky due to the uncanny valley. Game developers have got to watch out otherwise their hard efforts will be wasted when their models are very realistic, but not realistic enough to overcome the uncanny valley.

Reading the comments from these post, I believe the developers have done their job; scare the shit out of you. Let's stop our bickering for a second, ignore the lip syncing and watch the clip. You can clearly see a level of expression (especially towards the end) that simply has not been seen before on a games console, and I think it's great.

Besides, this is just a tech demo, and I'm sure the developers of this are listening to the complaints about the lip synching, and it'll all be fixed and then we can all be freaked out more. Yay. :)

Actually I think the part where she acts is really cool. But when she smiles... aww, scary.

BTW, Farenheit was very well written and directed, but almost a pain to play on Pc due to the button bashing sections.

Notice how the *inside* of her mouth lights up when the lightning flashes *behind* her?

Give me more of that rockin' PS3 Power!!!!! YAWN

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Is it just me, or was anyone else just as freaked out by the facial animations in Oblivion. I mean, what the hell was up with king whatsisbucket?