Partway throughout the latest Medal of Honor game, you almost die in an ambush. Your AI buddy saves you, then allows you to your feet. It may be a poignant moment; instead it’s chilling, because his eyes are completely lifeless.

Or, you’re playing Mass Effect 2, engaged in a significant conversation with one of your crewmates. Except which you can’t take it seriously, because you keep observing his teeth. There’s something terribly wrong together with his teeth.

Welcome to the Uncanny Valley .

The concept of the Uncanny Valley originally applied to robots, and was first presented by Japanese roboticist Mashiro Mori in a chart.

Mori suggested that as robots looked and behaved more like humans, they became more easily accepted by real humans – up to a degree. When a robot’s behavior becomes very similar, but not exactly like, human behavior, our reactions become increasingly negative. Sooner or later, if a robot’s behavior becomes indistinguishable from human behavior, we accept the robot.

As with robots, the Uncanny Valley applies to characters generated with 3D graphics. To that end, we’ll inspect how real-time 3D graphics in games has evolved through the years, and how games that attempt to achieve some level of realism have settled deep into the depths of the Uncanny Valley. We’re unlikely to speak about movies or pre-rendered 3D animation.

Before we do, however, let’s divide the issue up slightly.
•    Appearance. That’s how a character looks and appears, particularly faces.
•    Movement. How does a character move during the world? Does he or she move like a real person moves?
•    Behavior. When a character talks, or responds emotionally, does that behavior seem realistic?

Appearance

Emotional acceptance of a character makes a huge difference if the character is designed to be stylized, or to search realistically human. The shading and artwork in Borderlands, as an instance, resembles a graphic novel, so it’s relatively easy for us to suspend our disbelief. These characters don’t look real enough to be disturbing.

While game designers made some attempts through the years to create more realistic looking characters, the technology and tools were pretty limited until the previous few years. Rolling back the clock, no person would suggest that the early ” 2-1/2D” games of the early 1990s looked remotely realistic. Yes, for the day, they were immersive and looked great. But nobody would call Duke Nukem from the original Duke Nukem 3D a practical looking character.

Over the years, technology evolved, and the arrival of programmable shader technology with DirectX 8 and the brand new generation of high definition game consoles, gave programmers the graphics and compute muscle to aim more realistic looks to their characters.

In 2004, Valve finally shipped the long-awaited Half-Life 2. The character of Alyx proved to be among the more memorable creations, with relatively realistic facial animation and, primarily, eyes that looked as if it would respond to emotion. The character modeling for Alyx wasn’t perfect, nevertheless it was a large breakthrough in creating characters that gave the impression of real people. Still, the arena of Half-Life 2 and of Alyx are obviously computer generated.

If we move forward to 2007, Bioware’s Mass Effect took another breakthrough towards more realistic characters. The point of interest was a bit narrower, as Mass Effect attempted to model conversations more realistically. We’re not talking concerning the controversial radial conversation tree, but in regards to the facial animation and expressions. However, conversations in Mass Effect were still an eerie experience. Although the characters eyes were more expressive, they tended to wander away in odd directions.

Mass Effect 2 improved on facial expressions slightly, but the mouths-particularly teeth-still seemed jarring compared to conversations with real people.

Part of the constraint, obviously, is the necessity to model characters to run in a real-time environment, ready to hit no less than 30 frames per second, but targeting 60fps or more. This is why pre-rendered cut scenes using an analogous character models can look somewhat better-pre-rendered video takes substantially more compute time to generate, but then the game is simply playing back video.

While consoles are mired within the DirectX 9 era of graphics programmability and processor horsepower, PC technology marches on. AMD recently began shipping its second generation of DirectX 11 GPUs, while Nvidia’s DirectX 11 hardware offers a strong GPU compute architecture. Both AMD and Nvidia hardware is opening up interesting possibilities for more realistic character models. Notably, hardware tessellation is capable of smoothing out the polygonal heads, facial features and joints that detracted from the look of past generations of PC game characters.

But technology isn’t the complete answer. Artists should step up in addition. As we’ve seen with the new Medal of Honor game, the general visuals are approaching photorealism. Even the soldiers are looking more realistic – until you spot their faces, which might be without human emotion. On top of that, they don’t quite move like real people. Which brings us to our next topic.

Movement

Let’s climb in our wayback machine to the 1990s, when game developers began seeking to build more realistic looking characters. One seminal development was the original Tomb Raider, which arrived on the scene in 1995. Gamers were startled at just how realistic-for that time-the character of Lara Croft moved. Sure, the visual environments were still pretty blocky, and Lara’s appearance was still pretty cartoony. But when she ran, jumped and swan dived, you have to almost believe you were watching a real person.

That first Tomb Raider was one of the crucial earliest examples of using motion capture of real people, and applying it to real-time, interactive game animation. Over time, motion capture has become pretty common inside the game industry. Sometimes the consequences are unintentionally hilarious, as when human motions are applied to massive combat robots that weight 30 tons or more in Front Mission Evolved. Or, back to Mass Effect, where an identical set of motion capture data is used whether the foremost character is male or female.

The somewhat comical results we see illustrates the constraints of motion captured animation. There is just so much studio time available during game development. Then there’s the problem of the way, exactly, do you motion capture purely fictitious characters, like aliens which could have leg structures different from humans, or people running in powered body armor, as with the Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War games.

Even in case you limit yourself to human or human-like characters, problems persist. It’s difficult to become immersed in an MMO if the all of the characters are slide-walking internationally, or moving with jerky, unnatural motions.

Here, technology is having an impact in addition. Procedural animation-applying animation algorithms to models, as opposed to motion capture data-is one solution. Long ago, procedural animation has been limited, but the most recent capabilities of recent GPUs will likely have a prime impact. Middleware like Natural Motion (http://www.naturalmotion.com) try and address these issues with its Dynamic Motion Synthesis.

These varieties of technologies provide powerful toolsets for developers, but artists and programmers ought to spend time and effort generating the correct and most correct looking algorithms. Again, it’s not an issue of creating that four-legged centaur with tentacle arms move realistically-no person knows what that’s imagined to appear like. The issue is tips on how to make human characters move in a method that looks real and doesn’t leave players with a vague sense of unease.

Behavior

Modeling behavior is more subtle than appearance or movement. It’s not always immediately obvious whether a character or characters are behaving realistically. a very good example of this is often the combat behavior of AI opponents inside the newer Total War games, like Medieval 2: Total War. Before everything blush, the combat units move realistically. They retain unit cohesion across variable terrain.

But that appearance of realism breaks down as you play more. Artillery is ready up just a few yards behind buildings. Cavalry squadrons charge infantry squares willy-nilly. Infantry units wander aimlessly around the map. Obviously, that brings up the question: what’s realistic behavior? It’s in contrast to real generals in real historical battles always behaved rationally, either.

On a more personal level, modeling interpersonal relationships in a pragmatic way have met with limited success. Some of the more interesting attempts is Façade (http://www.interactivestory.net/), a first person game where you could type whole sentences into a natural language system that tries to interpret what you’re saying, and have the characters respond realistically.

Between the small scale of Façade and the huge scale of a Total War battle, there are a bunch of behaviors in-between, ranging from giving orders to a small group, looking to interact with non-player characters in an RPG or building faction relationships in an open world game.

The real problem with behavior is often player expectations. In our real world interactions, we are able to’t predict how friends, coworkers or antagonists might behave. Often, the game designers must build in predictability for the player, but that also ends up limiting possible options and minimizing realistic behavior. Gamers endlessly complain concerning the two-dimensional characterizations in video games , but then complain if those characters behave in a manner that we feel doesn’t reflect how that character should behave.

Bringing it All Together

What we actually need, needless to say, is the full pie: characters that look real, move like real people and behave and react as we would expect real people to behave. Creating characters like that will actually be possible with today’s technology-however it is probably not practical. What’s lacking are tools that span the complete range-appearance, movement and behavior-in an integrated way. Game engines and other middleware attempt this, but the improvement resources are usually too limited to truly pursue all three axes of realism.

So with regards to gaming, will the Uncanny Valley ever be crossed? Already, we’re commencing to see that happen in movies and television. Once you’ve seen The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the Lord of the Rings trilogy or the recently released Sintel, a 15-minute short animation sponsored by the Blender Foundation, you know that it could be done with non-interactive storytelling.

Bringing that level of realism to the interactive, real-time world of gaming is far larger challenge. In fact, players themselves are notoriously unpredictable. So while games might reach a believable level of realism with visuals and motion, crossing that last chasm of behavior is usually the deepest valley of all. [Image credits: IGN , 3Drealms , Aving ]

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This post is tagged: character talks, emotional acceptance, human behavior, Medal of Honor, medal of honor game, poignant moment, realistic appearance