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Comment by mumrah | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it's just me, but these blue dudes are not quite out of the uncanny valley.

The blue dudes are very human-like, yet are not humans. Therefore, even if you saw them in real life, they would be in the "uncanny valley." The real uncanny valley only applies to attempted depictions of humans. Heck, a shorn chimpanzee is practically in the same uncanny valley as the blue dudes.

* The real uncanny valley only applies to attempted depictions of humans.*

In my experience the same reaction, though sometimes muted, applies to just about any living thing Hollywood attempts to computer generate. I can't remember having ever seen a convincing depiction of a dog, cat, or even insect for that matter.

It's entirely possible that an alien humanoid biological creature would appear to be obviously living to us in the same way as other non-human animals, and thus subject to the same "uncanny valley."

The uncanny valley can be used to good effect though: zombies for instance. It's very hard to make a zombie scary if you've got it too low on the uncanny valley that people can't get past going "aww it's so cute!"

I haven't got the creepy feeling I have from other attempts, so I'd likely put them on the upward exponential out of the uncanny valley. I believe this may be greatly helped by the fact they're not supposed to look human.

It's like the aliens in the new Star Trek, the absolute weirdest was the comedic throwback of the green chick. The lack of prosthetics to modify her made her feel so much weirder than any of the others.

The fact that people are going to be going into the movie seeing spaceships and humans rendered in CGI before they see any of the aliens may help the aliens out of the uncanny valley. After wading through Disney Land and finding one of the humanoid robots they don't appear as false as the highly realistic androids being made in Japan despite not being of as good craftsmanship, why? Well I just walked through a mile of talking humanoid mice, anything remotely human is now believable!

However something to point out: Capgras syndrome gives the sufferer this 'uncanny valley' effect to anyone the person knows, they'll believe the person has been replaced by a duplicate.

A marker of how far we are through the uncanny valley is how close to human the creatures are that we are asked to believe in.

Gollum in LOTR looked abhuman because well, he was supposed to.

Humanoid blue aliens are easier to "get right" than actual humans because nobody really knows how they are supposed to look and act.

I have seen plenty of CGI pictures on the other side of the uncanny valley. The problem seems to be motion and lighting.

Yep. still pictures are a lot further than moving ones.

I don't think it's that stills are "further" as much as that the error doesn't accumulate.

This is actually noted in much of the 'uncanny valley' predictions, in that the positive and negative effects are less severe. A static picture can look human enough to fool you, however a video doesn't take long before something clues you in and at 24fps you're likely to clue in fast.

However zombies don't look as horrifying in still pictures as they do in animation. Catching the bottom of the uncanny valley can have its benefit for directors as well.

Some of that is just an engineering resource problem. If you can bring yourself to watch Peter Jackson's awful King Kong remake, the giant ape looks incredibly good while creatures in the valley of the dinosaurs are dreadful...on the big screen I was able to spot that they'd been done by two different FX teams (CG/compositing geek here, so I'm abnormally fussy).

They are as deep down there as possible. Which can be a good thing if you take it as a sign that we're almost at the maximum. Still seeing the trailers I'm not sure how I'm supposed to sympathise with them. Also the story doesn't seem overly interesting either. I guess we will see.

Their mouth movements are more natural and human than the creepy marionettes in Robert Zemeckis's "performance capture" movies.

I agree. Those characters make me feel like this movie is a Sci-Fi Channel Original.

Definitely excited to see the new film techniques though.

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