For most of the video the sound is really quiet. Turning sound way up was bad idea, the sudden LOUD scream almost made me drop my drink.

Downvote for screaming in my fucking ear!

I find the real girl in this video to be extremely hot. Anyone else?

As for the technology, it still looks way wrong when the characters smile.

I can still tell it's not real.

I would have to say that these folks walked down to the bottom of uncanny valley and built a cabin there, I hear the fishing is good. I hope they start walking up the other side soon.

I don't think the OP understands what "uncanny valley" is. It's not somewhere you want to be, it's where photo real human CG characters are currently stuck; where people's reaction to the "photo real" character is a sense of loooking at an automoton or zombie.

The lips give it away that it's not real imo. Still great stuff.

not very close to the real face. The real face is much more expressive and twitchy. Muscles and tendons can be seen moving in the real face. Matrix, other movies and some game cinematics have been better already. -karl

I wouldn't say that others have done it better, but this is still a long way from getting out of the valley.

I don't find it particularly 'real' as such, I have seen better than this. The impressive thing is that it's an auto generated animation based on the actor, and in that, for the fine level of detail it achieves it's impressive.

But no, not that realistic.

Also, I think the poster does indeed understand what the uncanny valley is. They're suggesting that this is really close to being so good that we stop having the revulsion reaction to the cg character and start accepting it as human. (see the graph on the wikipedia page to understand what we're on about)

I would forgive all--even the scream--if she were virtually topless.

All it would take for this thing to cross the uncanny valley would be a bit more work with the eyes. They're just not "alive." Really, though, that's just an engineering problem; it's just a somewhat more fine-tuned version of what they have already done.

Image Metrics was featured on the CGSociety website.

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=4480

It's still missing something in the eyes.

Well, the animation system looks incredible. Now they just need to develop a better audio normalization algorithm.

the uncanny valley will always be there as long as game developers are too lazy to animate their mocap stuff properly. There are some painful mocap performances out there that do not match at all with the models they are put in to, especially when it involves lipsynching, and it seems less and less like animators are willing to tweak them to make sure they even look right on the model they're going on!

Erm, I mean.. This is really neat! n.n

Yeah, I think this is smack dab in the middle of the valley...