At some point in the production of every live-action adaptation of an illustrated franchise, creative teams have to go about the important business of choosing just how closely to hew to the aesthetic style of the source material. Staring into the lead character’s disturbingly large eyes, it’s safe to say Alita:…
It’s easier to mindlessly blast away a room full of video game baddies when they look at you with dead eyes and zombie-like facial expressions. It’s a completely different challenge when they appear to be expressing actual emotions and pain, made all the more believable with this new advanced facial animation tool for…
Hollywood has a history of animating kids in ways that are supposed to be adorable, but end up giving us night terrors. The Boss Baby, out March 31, will be the latest offender; it’s about an infant voiced by Alec Baldwin who’s somehow secretly a corporate executive. Insane plot aside, that beligerent, giant -headed…
“Virtual reality, to me, is the only reality.” So begins Uncanny Valley, a short from Argentina’s Federico Heller that’s on the fast track to becoming a feature, thanks to the efforts of Independence Day: Resurgence writer Carter Blanchard. Watch the film below and see why it’s generated so much excitement.
Most robots don’t have IMDb pages. Geminoid F isn’t most robots.
A team of British researchers have a salacious hypothesis: People like robots more when they exhibit the same sorts of flaws that characterize humans. This makes some sense—after all, the notion of a perfect, all-knowing robot is the stuff of dystopian science fiction. But do you know what’s worse than a perfect,…
Matt McMullen’s RealDoll proved some people are willing to pay thousands of dollars for a fully customized sex doll. His new project, Realbotix, will try to integrate robotics and artificial intelligence to enhance the experience (and make it far more expensive). Check out the video at the New York Times’ Bits site.
I can't look away. This "realistic" life-sized Marty McFly I found on eBay is just too... creepy. The uncanny valley is definitely in full effect here.
Julie Beck's latest feature for The Atlantic is chock-full of all the salacious factoids one expects from an article titled "A (Straight, Male) History of Sex Dolls."
In 1995 Eugene Volokh wrote the most paleofuturish article ever written. By that I mean it's an incredibly prescient meditation on the future of media and technology. But it has just enough weird anachronisms to remind us that nobody can predict the future with absolute certainty.
The "uncanny valley" is that creepy Final Fantasy feeling when a robot or CGI character is too dead-eyed to be believable, but too realistic to be cute. Roboticists and animators have long tried to avoid creations that induce this psychological state. But maybe they've been worried about nothing.
Theoretically, a perfect robot face would look normal. But until we reach utter perfection, everything that falls even slightly short is horrifying. Take, for instance, this robot visage powered by ravenously hungry slime mold. It's surprisingly functional, and unsurprisingly nightmarish.
A central theme of the recently concluded GF2045 Congress was the idea of achieving a kind of immortality by transferring our minds to avatars or robots. Indeed, as Japanese professor Hiroshi Ishiguro’s presentation clearly showed, our robotic doppelgangers will truly be made to look and act like the real thing.
We're not entirely sure if United Arrows' new MarionetteBot makes mannequins more or less creepy, but it's certainly attracting attention. To make it work, the popular Japanese clothing chain equipped a mannequin with a series of motors and 16 wires that are guided by a Kinect. By standing and moving in front of the…
We've known about Machine Perception Lab's super-realistic robot baby for quite some time now, but we've never actually seen it in action — at least until now. As this new video shows, roboticists appear to be getting perilously close to crossing the uncanny valley — while scaring the crap out of the good children…
This Halloween, do you harbor the sociopathic desire to convey to everyone you know and appreciate — once and for all — that you truly are a walking nightmare? If so, why not make an unnerving 3D mask of your own face?
This is really, really, really impressive. The folks at Disney Research Zurich have just unveiled what they call a "new physical face cloning method" that allows them to fabricate an artificial human face (for use with an animatronics model) at mind-blowing levels of detail. The modeling methods are incredibly…
You've got to hand it to Nicole Lazzeri and her colleagues at the University of Pisa for creating the robot you see here. Its facial features are some of the most dynamic and convincing we've seen yet — but something's still a little off.
A good-looking robot is seriously hard to find. Robots can be pretty, some even handsome, but as soon as they get too realistic they start to creep us out. A new system for helping robots to generate more realistic expressions might go some way to help.
