Comment by abledon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by abledon | Hacker News Reader

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I wonder if the majority of people designing/pushing these huge systems of weird cartoon avatar interaction systems... are a tad bit on the spectrum (Which gives them superpowers in understanding tech/algorithms....) but a side effect is the uncanny valley of these weird avatars being pushed by these teams at Meta/FB. It feels more 'creepy' to me talking to a cartoon 'uncanny-valley' representation of a person rather than just seeing their actual photo/video feed.

reading this post on "Avatars, Anthropomorphism, and Autism Spectrum Disorder"...

> A 2016 study looked measured the neural responses of children with ASD and neurotypical children when shown unfamiliar human and robot faces. The test showed that the targeted responses were present for both for neurotypical children, but only for the robot faces for the kids with ASD. “Together, these studies provide some evidence that individuals with ASD may typically process anthropomorphic rather than human faces

https://codebaby.com/avatars-anthropomorphism-and-autism-spe...

I think it's much more a facet of limited performance (as mentioned in the talk itself) on these platforms rather than anything else. Performance on headsets is a challenge on pretty much all of these apps, from VRChat to Rec Room. I also think a lot of people that look just at the pictures don't realize that presence in VR adds a lot and can compensate for some loss of graphical fidelity. It's like how the first 3D games were quite blocky and a lot less refined than the best 2D games of the era but just the ability to move your character and the camera in 3D compensated for the bad graphics, to an extent.

But why the fuck do I need this when I can multi task using screens. It just feels that once they do their final state multiverse and force us inside, we ll still have multiple screens and workspace area to organize.

The population is not even massively growing so we probably will never have a space issue ...

Not everyone has space, not everyone wants to spend tons of money (generally the same people who don't have space) on 5 displays and the OS config to make 5 displays work. Some people travel a lot for work. There will always be enthusiasts like the people who spend absurd amounts of money on fancy mechanical keyboards, but once VR resolution becomes good enough for work, anyone who wants/works better with large screen real-estate or travels for work a lot will just dump monitors.

BTW if you're actually interested in this, Carmack talks about this and the state of the Oculus around ~ 56 min in the linked video.

While I agree with most of your comment (I don't have space — it's ridiculously expensive! Wouldn't mind another monitor but it's also a bit expensive…)

> absurd amounts of money on fancy mechanical keyboards

Fancy mechanical keyboards aren't really expensive? (compared to monitors, or space, or even really VR headsets…) Most of the people I know who have them also have them because RSI. That forces you into being an enthusiast whether you want it or not. But a single trip to the doctors saved and the keyboard pays for itself.

But they're also just better keyboards too.

Oh I don't mean the keyboards are expensive. I mean the folks that collect keyboards.

> and the OS config to make 5 displays work

I find this tendency funny. It's kinda crazy we keep building new very hard innovative software to avoid needing to fix boring software.

I bet vscode will never support multiple monitors, even in vr.

>The population is not even massively growing so we probably will never have a space issue ...

Our massive real estate issues that are pricing people out of having enough space to live in the last decades, have less to do with the population growth in the world in this time frame and more to do with immigration and economic and building policies that must see the asset prices always go up by significant margins to "beat the market".

There's also the issue of location and internal and external migration where given a constant worldwide population, everyone is migration to the handful of cities with jobs, infrastructure and QoL, pushing prices up. I've seen this in my home country that saw a massive population decline yet a massive increase in real estate prices proving that the price of housing is not determined by taking the number of houses in the country and dividing it by the number of people in the country giving us the supply/demand ratio determining the housing price factor, as not people are competing for real estate but piles of money are, since it's also a speculative investment vehicle, and so the bigger piles of money are winning, regardless of the total houses to people ratio.

I've gone a bit off topic but my point is that the struggle for affordable living space is real and is gonna get worse despite the world population not increasing that much, as in traditional capitalist fashion, the banks, companies and people who already have wealth and assets will use it as leverage to aquire more of it, pushing the prices up, at the detriment of those trying to enter the market now with less capital.

TL;DR: The housing situation has nothing to do with population growth trends but everything to do with growing piles of money competing for a pie that's relatively fixed in size. This cannot end well.

because it cost nothing to change a screen into 10 of custom size like you are in a nasa control room? why in the world would I buy 4 monitors when I can have it virtually. This is the beginning of the death of the monitor market

> This is the beginning of the death of the monitor market.

no. no it is not.

for one thing, people are always going to need to view screens when they are not at home or at work.

screens have a VERY long way to go before you can reproduce the clarity and just sheer number of pixels available to display clear information to the eyes in VR.

even if eye tracking is used, and even if you only render where the user is looking, the virtual monitors must be legible, and VR headsets are nowhere near that kind of pixel density, yet. they're fine for rendering scenery and walls and avatars, and conveying motion, but if you want to read a screen of text on one of your five virtual monitors without leaning in and making that monitor consume much more field of view, you're going to need LCD displays for headsets which have 10x the resolution in both X and Y than are available today. maybe only 7x.

and there will always be afterbirths like me who get motion sick instantly, and for a full 24 hours minimum, in VR no matter how good the experience is.

I'll keep my monitors, thanks.

> I think it's much more a facet of limited performance (as mentioned in the talk itself) on these platforms rather than anything else.

VRChat avatars have personality. On hardware now 6 years old.

People are reacting to the lack of personality, not the lack of immersion.

On PC hardware. This looks like it was built from the ground up for Quest and have a ready to customize one for each user instead of a painstakingly hand crafted one created in blender.

Most VRChat avatars need PC to run and still cause instability on lower end PCVR setups. Quest can't even render them half the time.

IIUC, users have to specifically upload a mobile version for VRC on Quest to display an avatar, rather than it trying and failing by chances. It's files missing or present difference.

Hm interesting, when I'm in VRC on Quest I see low poly avatars (haven't compared with the exact experience on PCVR mostly because if I have the Quest on I'm going to use the Quest) so I figured it was some sort of graceful degradation, but guess I'm wrong.

I don't think those avatars have enough human likeness to really trigger the uncanny valley effect.

I think it is weird for a different reason: it looks like 1990s tech - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Worlds

As best I can tell the push for this comes from the top and no one who knows better is stopping him.

The push for low fidelity, as usual, and as mentioned in this very talk, is the limited power of these mobile systems pushing dual 2k displays at 90Hz.

The issue is not in polygon counts, but artistic qualities. There would be PS2 games that would look more comfortable and/or convincing than this.

But running at 120fps at basically 4k resolution while scanning 5 camera inputs on the same low power mobile CPU? I think not.

And remember these scenes can be modified by users and are loaded as needed.

This is not like a precooked scene in a computer game where designers spend weeks fine-tuning the lighting model.

I notice pretty much all quest apps use ambient lighting only which gives them this fake look. Some nice spotlights would do a world of good. But I guess anything better than this is just too expensive for the system.

I'm pretty confident this has more polygons and higher resolution textures than a gameplay scene in Final Fantasy XII. Those models had 256x256 textures and 1500 polygons total per character. Just the glasses virtual-Carmack is wearing are probably pushing 200+ polygons when they could be 3 quads and a clever texture. I was going to think maybe they wanted to avoid using transparency in their textures, but he's standing in front of a large virtual glass door.

But still I agree with the other commenters, they should have gone MORE cartoony and more simple. This is just a simultaneously creepy and goofy middle-ground.

It's not the number of polygons that is the problem, its how they are arranged.

They need to hire an better Art Director.

They could take some polygons out of the glasses and give the characters legs at least!

Update: They are a actually doing a lot there. The lips and eyebrows are moving. It has skinned animation. When I started in the industry we were designing characters that would inanimate without skinning, everything was static like a wooden puppet.

See the keynote for the resin for the lack of legs, and the new avatars coming soon.

Mii avatars probably have even less polygons and use simpler shading and they look a lot better to me.

You actually don’t get the “uncanny” feeling from this? Compared to non-Meta avatar systems and game graphics? Are non-gamers less susceptible to it? Is that how these avatar systems goes through the front door???

I'm very much a gamer but I don't think this is so bad, no..

I’m more than a touch aspy myself which makes this faux-biting rebuke that sounds cool in only my head a bit meta: but nerds figured out how to sell tech stuff to normies quite some time ago.

Zuck hasn't.

Of all the things to criticize Mark for, being bad at making money seems a weird one.

Not being bad at making money, but selling something other than eyeballs is a vastly different proposition.

He’s certainly good at making money but consistently horrible at keeping nerds around.

(Shrug) He owns John Carmack...

What has he successfully sold to consumers?

Their own lives

Advertising and alot of it.

I dunno? If you consider paying in privacy or mental health and getting webshit sun return to be "buying something", then Zuck is probably humanities most successful salesman...

Sure he has! He keeps them in rage-loops so he can show them ads and manipulate politics

It looks like they're trying make corporate Memphis art meets DreamWorks movie character design into just the standard avatar. Insanely goofy.

The biggest games are Orcs, Humans and a Lot of Brown (the Riot and most of the Blizzard portfolios). Or Toon With a Lot Of Purple (Overwatch, Fortnite, many Playstation titles). Or Brown (Modern Warfare, PUBG, CS:GO, R6). Or anime. Or photoreal (Unreal engine titles excluding Valorant & Fortnite, RDR, Cyberpunk...)

When you reach 100m users, the ideas get limited. C'est la vie.

I initially thought the same, but using even the current gen avatars for multiplayer on the Quest 2 feels great and is surprisingly convincing. The speech to mouth movement detection looks natural and combined with the body language being accurately represented with reverse kinematics I felt like I was colocating very realistically.

I suspect its just easier and faster (in terms of cpu and network throughput) to translate human facial expessions to a digital represebtation and apply it to lofi animated character than using something more hi def.

>Which gives them superpowers in understanding tech/algorithms...

does it?

> weird cartoon avatar interaction systems

Imagine the opposite - photorealistic avatars. There would be no interaction! You'd spend all your time rendering.

> photorealistic avatars.

It's coming, to, of all things, Second Life. Second Life is adding "puppeteering", and this works with head tracking, face tracking, and full body tracking. Users have been working on VR viewers. (The client is open source.) It's all very experimental, but there is a meeting in Second Life every two weeks[1] where all of this is demoed. Some of the attendees are rigged for full body tracking, and, with good quality Second Life avatars, which have far more detail than Meta or VRChat, and can do facial expressions, they look reasonably good. It's striking how someone with a full rig dominates a meeting without even trying. They're so much more present than the people sitting at keyboards.

Hardware is a big problem. You need a good gamer PC to run all this and get the full effect. And a VR headset. And tracking gear. This is a real problem in the era of the $99 Chromebook. It's not getting cheaper, either. The first NVidia graphics card that was good enough for this was the NVidia 1060 with 6GB VRAM, in 2016, introduced at $250. It still costs about $250 to get that level of GPU power from NVidia.

People who really want to be looked at - performers, influencers, etc - will need a full tracking rig. The audience doesn't.

[1] https://community.secondlife.com/blogs/entry/6509-introducin...

> Imagine the opposite - photorealistic avatars.

You mean like... video?

These deep down in the uncanny valley stuff is usually done by assigned neurotypicals, not autistic. Autists are usually good at staying out of it.

Please stop perpetuating this harmful stereotype about people with ASD.

Maybe if Zuckerberg himself didn't look so much like a plastic lizard, his avatar wouldn't be so creepy.

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