Intelligent Artifice points out that there’s an interesting discussion going on in the comics/CGI blogosphere. The question is – why has the Incredibles earned nearly 200 million dollars, whereas Polar Express has barely earned 2.5 million of its 265 million cost back on its opening day? Many blame the MoCap of Tom Hanks, which were able to capture all of his movements except for his eyes and lips, creating a uniquely eerie experience. Or, as ‘The Beat’ puts it:

[One] is a marvelous romp, the other, frankly, scares the shit out of us…the beds of American children are going to be soaked with anxiety pee after watching a creepy digital Tom Hanks shout “All aboard!!!”

The animation industry has a term for the point in which graphic animation looks so good, it’s creepy. They call it The Uncanny Valley, a theory first propogated by Japanese roboticist Doctor Masahiro Mori.

Stated simply, the idea is that if one were to plot emotional response against similarity to human appearance and movement, the curve is not a sure, steady upward trend. Instead, there is a peak shortly before one reaches a completely human “look” . . . but then a deep chasm plunges below neutrality into a strongly negative response before rebounding to a second peak where resemblance to humanity is complete….

The conclusion drawn by the good doctor is that designers of robots or prosthetics should not strive overly hard to duplicate human appearance, lest some seemingly minor flaw drop the hapless android or cyborg into the uncanny valley — a fate to be dreaded by all concerned. He maintains instead that a prosthesis or a robot should be visibly artificial, but smart and stylish in appearance, placing it somewhere near the top of the first peak.

(Go read the article. No, really). Other commentary can be found here and here. Note: graph stolen blatantly from these blogs.

This has long been a discussion amongst CGI animators, but is just now becoming a topic of debate amongst game developers. For years and years, it’s just been assumed that making more life-like characters was the way to go. However, we’re finally to the point where we can create realistic-looking characters in a real-time graphics engine. But no matter what we do, or how brilliant the SIGGraph speeches, there seems to be a line that can’t be crossed, a line where characters seem to have plastic skin and creepy faces.

When I was at a startup, we were in talks with XBox to publish our title. Even though our title was aimed at a more casual “Sims”-y audience, Microsoft wanted us to make the art as realistic as possible. Their opinion – cartoony characters would never be able to show off the true awesomeness of their hardware.

Our counter was that the best games did NOT have realistic characters – the Sims and Warcraft have highly stylized characters. The advantages of this are legion. You can identify a Warcraft screenshot with a glance. The Sims age better than your average realistic title. And, of course, you avoid the Uncanny Valley.

Needless to say, we’ll have a real chance to see the difference between the two as EQ2 and WoW square off. EQ2 is betting on having top-notched realistic graphics, whereas WoW’s engine lags behind EQ2’s, and instead bets on a highly stylized look. It will be interesting to see how the two do against each other and, once we have retrospect, see if either team thinks the Uncanny Valley is a factor.