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Comment by SubiculumCode | Hacker News Reader

Sure graphics are looking amazing...but I still think we are in the uncanny valley. Especially when it comes to faces.

I agree. Rogue one was a great example. I found it very disturbing. Both Tarkin's and Leia's face

Right and even when it was just about perfect it's unsettling because you get taken out of the moment wondering, "Am I looking at a real person or CGI"?

It isn't so much the faces look either, but how the faces move. Movement is often too slow, too long, too regular...and ill-timed.

Yes! Motion is key. It's not enough to be photorealistic -- you need to be "videorealistic" as well.

Is that something deep learning could tackle? (asking as a complete non-expert in DL)

It feels like a similar problem to realistic speech synthesis, and there have been some really impressive TTS demos recently.

Athough on that note, how come Google can produce these amazing speech synthesis demos, but Google Maps still sounds robotic when giving directions? Is there some big problem around generalizing or productionizing the technology? Is there some hidden trickery behind the demos?

I'd have thought that putting tracking dots on a person's face could have solved some of these things.

I think that's what they did, though.

http://www.indiewire.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/an1-2740...

I went in to the movie not knowing that Tarkin was CGI - I assumed he was a stand-in and makeup - and came away none the wiser. After I was told he was CG, it was obvious and weird...

Wonder how much of the uncanny valley stuff left is in our heads?

I know a few people had that reaction, but I went in blind too and the CGI was painfully obvious. They had close-ups of Tarkin which looked really terrible.

CGI is superb at creating indistinguishable still images, but animation is still riddled with problems.

animation was too "perfect" in my eyes.

he looked like a wax figure from madame tussauds that was animate

At least wax figurines get lit realistically, the one place most CGI seems to fail.

It is easy to A-B test. Maybe someone has done that already?

What would you ask the test subjects though? Seems to me as soon as you say anything regarding realism a lot percentage would notice things they wouldn't have before. I'm sure a clever experiment designer could come up with something though.

Show a mix of video clips. Swipe left for real. Swipe right for CGI. After a few clips, show how often you were right. Hit the HN frontpage.

Had the opposite reaction. Went in not knowing, then when I saw Tarkin and Leia I was kind of thinking, wtf? They digitally rendered their faces? When I talked to friends afterwards they didn't notice it. This must be pushing some sort of mental limit of our brains - not everyone recognizes faces/cg the same as others.

I was blown away by Tarkin, I kept thinking how in the heck did they bring him back exactly as he was? Leia was another matter, something was not quite right with her.

It's funny, while both felt pretty plasticky; Leia looked much better to my eyes than Tarkin. The brevity and minimal movement helped, I think.

Out of curiosity, did you see it in 3D? Most of my friends that saw it in 3D were complaining about how bad the renderd Leia and Tarkin were, but very few of my friends who saw it in 2D had any complaints about it.

I almost find this hard to believe, unless you seen it somewhere with poor resolution or lighting. Sure they did a good job, but they were so noticeable it broke the spell of the movie for me. They are the best proof that we are still in the uncanny valley.

I saw the film on one of those tiny in-flight screens (maybe 9 inches diagonal?) and even there it was painfully obvious.

Me too, but a friend of mine hadn't noticed that certain characters were CGI, so it must work for some of us.

Agreed. And I always associated the uncanny valley with representations of humans, not terrain, robots, etc.

I urge you to watch Blade Runner 2049. Minor spoiler: there is a scene involving Rachael. They brought in the original actress and de-aged her face digitally to look like she did in her 20s and the effect was... mind-bogglingly close to perfect. Easily the best facial CG I've seen so far.

> They brought in the original actress and de-aged her face digitally

No, Sean Young (the original Rachael) was brought in to consult, but the CGI face was superimposed on a stand-in, Loren Peta [1].

I saw the movie on Monday and wasn't impressed with the quality there; worse than Rogue One Tarkin and on a par with Rogue One Leia. As many others have opined in this thread, the technology's fine for stills but really, really not there for animation.

YMMV, obviously. I have a friend who made it about a third of the way through Zemeckis' 2007 Beowulf before asking "hey, why did it all just go CGI?", and that movie wasn't remotely aiming for photorealism.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_Runner_2049#Cast

It may be a while. We have a large amount of evolutionary neural instinct when it comes to human facial recognition. Realize that camouflage in nature is very common, and as a result our ability to distinguish a real human face from a predator imposter has our entire evolution and survival baked in.

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