Entering Uncanny Valley

An animation company has finally managed to create a computer-generated human that most watchers can't distinguish from a real person. Frightening...and awesome.

Forget the clunky CG characters in most animated movies today — in a few years, you could be watching animated films with synthespians that are almost indistinguishable from "live-action" ones. The video actually uses a motion capture of a human actor to create a life-like animation, and Image Metrics, whose animations were used in the Grand Theft Auto game, has developed a sure-fire way of making human faces look believable. Apparently it's all about the eyes, and the little asymmetries of the human face. There's a lot more fine control over the details in this new system, according to chief operating officer Mike Starkenburg:

There's always been control systems for different facial movements, but say in the past you had a dial for controlling whether an eye was open or closed, and in one frame you set the eye at 3/4 open, the next 1/2 open etc. This is like achieving that degree of control with much finer movements... For instance, you could be controlling the movement in the top 3-4mm of the right side of the smile

Between that and the ideas from The Surrogates, virtual living is going to be the biggest threat to life and reality.