Take a stroll through the uncanny valley with Emily, an impressive example of how far facial animation has progressed –
Previous methods for animating faces have involved putting dots on a face and observing the way the dots move, but Image Metrics analyses facial movements at the level of individual pixels in a video, meaning that the subtlest variations – such as the way the skin creases around the eyes, can be tracked.
“There’s always been control systems for different facial movements, but say in the past you had a dial for controlling whether an eye was open or closed, and in one frame you set the eye at 3/4 open, the next 1/2 open etc. This is like achieving that degree of control with much finer movements.
“For instance, you could be controlling the movement in the top 3-4mm of the right side of the smile,”
CGI house Image Metrics has certainly done some amazing work here – but I’m still left with that eerie feeling of faux-humanity. – Lifelike animation heralds new era for computer games [via Neatorama]
16 thoughts on “Emily is not real.”
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That’s weird, she looks like Natalie Portman.
Nice job though, but IMO there’s still a cold vibe on this face.
wow good call – i couldnt quite place the resemblence.
I wonder how much simply knowing it was fake influenced my “creepy” judgement. If/when CGI persons become commonplace, viewers would likely become more doubting/suspicious of images in media. I could imagine a future fashion trend where people attempt to look/act more artificial intentionally … but I suppose in some ways, that’s already taking place :/
The quality on the youtube video is just terrible.. Timesonline link is not really any better.
Would be nice to see something high res.
that’s odd, the vimeo version looks like crud as well –
hmmm … perhaps the illusion breaks down without the proper compression artifacts :)
yeah, it’s still creepy. I think the realism magnifies the little discrepncies like when her mouth moves in odd ways, or the lack of fine-tuned emotions.
Reminds me of a movie with Al Pacino, called “SimOne (Simone)”. I really enjoyed the movie, worth a rent.
But.. If I wouldn’t of read that she was fake, I would of thought she the mouth just moved weird when she talked [like Jessica Simpson’s mouth when she sings] and that the sound track wasn’t in sync with the video.
It is still impressive.
Either way it is still amazing how far technology has come. If I watched this without knowing it could have passed for a human easily
the specular one looks like a clip from batman begins