There goes the Guild

From The Telegraph:
"When a computer-generated or android character reaches that deeply unnerving point of “almost, but not quite” – like the empty-eyed characters in some early motion-capture films, such as The Polar Express – they’re said to fall into the “uncanny valley”. Tumble in too deep and the result can be ruinous. The 2011 animation Mars Needs Moms – one of the worst-affected films to date – was one of the gravest box-office bombs in history.

The uncanny valley is itself a Japanese discovery. Its existence was first noted in a 1970 experiment by Masahiro Mori, a robotics professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, in which the “likeability” of various human-like faces was mapped onto a graph. As the faces became more lifelike, their likeability ratings increased. But suddenly, at around the 85 per cent lifelike mark, the likeability score plummeted – before soaring back up again, just as quickly, as it approached 100.

Prof Mori’s experiment found that pictures of robots and cuddly toys appeared on one side of the valley, and fit and healthy humans on the other. But the image that appeared in between them that suddenly caused the drop in likeability was the face of a human corpse – and that any other face that was lifelike to a similar degree, even if it had obviously never been alive in the first place, would provoke the same kind of instinctual revulsion.

Meet Geminoid F. In many ways, she’s perfect for the movie business. She’s beautiful, engaging, and can carry out a director’s every request on cue.

Time after time, she replicates the same performance without the slightest fluff or fumble, and can work for weeks on end without complaint. You don’t even have to pay her. Just remember to plug her in at night so she doesn’t die on set the next day, and she’ll be fine.

Geminoid F is an android – a robot designed to look and act like a human being (although the one thing she cannot do is walk) – and the first of her kind to co-star in a film.

,,,Geminoid F is the latest in a line of androids Ishiguro has created at Osaka University’s Intelligent Robotics Laboratory."




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