Aug 19th 2008 05:37 pm links for 2008-08-19
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The article claims that 'Emily,' the woman in the animation, "is considered to be one of the first animations to have overleapt a long-standing barrier known as 'uncanny valley' - which refers to the perception that animation looks less realistic as it approaches human likeness." Over half the comments claim that her eyes look "dead" or that she is "like a talking corpse," but I was pretty convinced.
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Worst prose of 2008. The goal of the contest is childishly simple: entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. I particularly like "Joanne watched her fellow passengers - a wizened man reading about alchemy; an oversized bearded man-child; a haunted, bespectacled young man with a scar; and a gaggle of private school children who chatted ceaselessly about Latin and flying around the hockey pitch and the two-faced teacher who they thought was a witch - there was a story here, she decided."
Posted by Kyle / linkspam
Collin on 19 Aug 2008 at 8:20 pm #
I don’t think “talking corpse” is an apt description but I agree that there is something off in the eyes. Also, the claim in the article that they can now capture “the most minute details” is false. If you go to the image metrics website there is a video on the front page that is higher quality than the one in the article. It shows the actress and the computer model side by side. If you watch, you can clearly see that there is more facial deformation in the actresses face than in the character. (And the actresses performance comes across better, I think.) The thing about stuff like this is that without being told it, most people probably wouldn’t consciously think “that’s fake” because there are no screaming indicators that it is, but it still gives a vague feeling of unease that compromises whatever performance the character is giving.