The Uncanny Valley and Phenomenological Communication Theory

At the very moment that you want to deeply emphasise with a 3D animated character you notice something is wrong, the eyes are completely lifeless or the body movement is all wrong, this is the moment of ‘The Uncanny Valley’.
The concept of the Uncanny Valley originally applied to robots, and was developed by Japanese roboticist Mashiro Mori.


Mori suggested that as robots look and behave more like humans, they became will be accepted by humans, but only up to a point. It is this tipping point that is important and when the moment is recognised it strikes deeply into the psyche as a moment of the uncanny Of course if a robot behaves just like us, with no differences we have no choice but to accept it. .
The Uncanny Valley applies to 3D characters in games and films as well, the high levels of realism making it a problem that is going to occur much more frequently.
Mori has three areas he examines as to when the Uncanny Valley effect takes place: Appearance, Movement and Behaviour. He uses the diagram below to explain how it works.




It interesting that he uses the example of Bunraku puppets. The heads of these puppets are made to represent different genders, social class and personalities and it can take up to 30 years training for a puppeteer to master the body movement and expressions.



A Bunraku puppet

Appearance is of course essential; we read people at first glance even when we know we shouldn’t. Emotional acceptance of a character makes a big difference, especially if the character is designed to be abstracted or to look realistically human. This is why early animation can be very abstract and yet we can emphasise with the characters and understand which emotion is being represented.




However in 2004, the game Half-Life 2 came out using the character of Alyx which had relatively realistic facial animation and, in particular, eyes that seemed to respond to emotion.



Alex from Half Life 2

In 2007, Bioware's Mass Effect attempted to model conversations more realistically by using better facial animation and expressions. However as better realism occurs the ‘uncanny valley’ effect deepens and in particular if eyes go wandering off we get a sense of dislocation.
All this relates to the phenomenology of communication and the fact that we are biologically attuned to each other’s faces.
This isn’t about better technology, artists could use facial expression in animation as far back as the 1930s, Medal of Honor soldiers are looking pretty realistic , but when you see their faces, they have no human emotion, they also don’t move in ways that make us think of human feelings. Movement being another area within which c ‘human’ experience is vital if we are to effect authentic communication.

It was Tomb Raider, (1995) that introduced the idea that realistic 3D movement was possible. It was one of the earliest examples of using motion capture graphics of real people, and applying it to real-time, interactive game animation.
Procedural animation, applying animation algorithms to models, rather than motion capture data, is now also being used, but the same limitations apply in that unless movement is spot on we read the emotional aspects of the character as disturbing or in some cases just funny.
It’s not a matter of making people move realistically. The problem is how to make human characters move in a way that doesn't leave you with the ‘uncanny valley’ vague sense of unease.
Modelling behaviour is more difficult than modelling appearance or movement.
The real problem with behaviour is our expectations of behaviour, which are of course based on our years of real world (phenomenological) experience. In built predictability for a character, ends up limiting possible options and minimizing realistic behaviour.

Recent movies such as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, demonstrate that you can achieve high levels of authentic phenomenological communication, (The problem there being to graft an adult actor's above-the-neck performance on to the body of a smaller actor) it will be interesting to see when these levels of authentic communication reach games design. However, if we go far enough away from the humanoid, then we much more readily accept human simulations as being like us. This accounts for the success of cinema characters such as R2-D2 and WALL-E. They act like humans but they don’t look like humans. This is perhaps the area to focus on, our anthropomorphism allows us to make connections with all sorts of non human things. Tom Hanks and his volleyball Wilson in the film Castaway for instance. But you have to get it right, look at the demise of ‘Clippy’ the puppy eyed paper-clip that used to come with Microsoft Office.



At some point the lessons of all the seven areas of communication theory will be embedded within artificially generated scenarios and at that point we just won’t know any difference between reality and simulation but occasionally when a character looks at you with that cold eye, you will shiver and realise you have just walked down the ‘uncanny valley’.

Communication Theory part two

We covered a few more communication theories on Wednesday. All of them were constitutive. The remaining 4 were.
Rhetorical
Socio-Psycological
Socio-Cultural
Critical
The handout was designed to sum these theories up and provide a matrix that could be used to set one theory against the other if you wanted to set up an argument that highlighted the weaknesses in each theory.
This will be added to the information on Moodle.

Communication Theory

Above: The Rosetta Stone. Find a copy in Leeds museum. This is a fantastic example of solid comunication theory.

The communications lecture
Just a few thoughts.
The first is that I was very aware that not everyone had been taken through how to take notes. In the handout given out on the day it says that we recommend the Cornell note-taking method. You can download a copy from http://eleven21.com/notetaker/
Typing up your notes is a blog task and easier to do when you can still remember what was being said.
So how would these look on a blog? The first problem is that you can’t, (or I can’t divide the page into two) so unless I scan my original notes, I have to type stuff.
It might therefore look like this.

Communication Theory Lecture
Everything to be said about this is summed up in: Lasswell's maxim:
“Who says what to whom in what channel with what effect"
PowerPoint is a problem because it can make you think in bullet points, but the tutor will give us a PowerPoint presentation anyway. We have to make notes when he rambles on.
There are 7 different sorts of communication theories.
These are either Transmissional or Constitutive.
The first one we are looking at is the Cybernetic or Information Theory of Communication. This is the only Transmissional theory.
Developed during WW2 because it was understood that good communications wins wars. Finally written down by Shannon and Weaver of Bell Laboratories 1949. It is a theory obviously written by telephone engineers, their early diagram is a bad drawing of a phone conversation of people speaking and listening, with the transmitter and receiver separated by what they called ‘noise’. This is a useful system because it can be turned into equations and so you can measure if things are working or not.
Its weakness is that it is not concerned with the production of meaning itself, which is a socially mediated process.
Three levels of potential communication problems
Level 1 Technical Accuracy
Systems of encoding and decoding, Compatibility of systems/need for specialist equipment or knowledge. E.g. PC and Mac operating systems, the tutor’s lack of computer knowhow.
Level 2 Semantic
Precision of language, How much of the message can be lost without meaning being lost?, What language to use? The tutor tried Serbo-Croat out on us but he couldn’t really speak it, but the point was communication is impossible unless we all understand the language it comes in.
Level 3
Effectiveness
Does the message affect behaviour the way we want it to? What can be done if the required effect fails to happen? The tutor tries to wake some of us up, he is worried about his effectiveness as a communicator.
The cybernetic theory can be seen as a type of Systems theory, we then looked at who are we communicating to? Audiences and Social Class. We thought that class was no longer a big issue. We also thought that no matter how you break an audience down into categories in the end everyone is different.

Semiotics. This is a Constitutive theory
Blah, blah, blah you get the picture, same type of writing as above.
Then at the end, if you remember I used the whiteboard to sum up.

In Summery
Communication Theory
“Who says what to whom in what channel with what effect"
7 Traditions
2 sorts
Transmissional and Constitutive.
Transmissional
Cybernetic
Constitutive
Semiotics
Phenomenological
The next 4 will be gone through next week

Thoughts on the Bradford Animation Festival

No session this week as it’s the Bradford Animation Festival but even so there are always issues to think through.
I notice Lionhead’s Fable 3 is being promoted and you will get a chance to meet people behind the new 3D set up.
As always it’s what is behind this that intrigues me.
Fable is advertised as being set in the “enthralling fantasy world of Albion”. This links the game back into a long history, Albion not only being the ancient name for Britain but it has a poetic resonance for us because of the still powerful influence of the poet William Blake on our ideas of what it is to be English.
The earliest writings (6th century BC) that refer to where we live as Albion, refer to the Albiones. By the 1st century AD, the name definitely refers to what we would call Great Britain. Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History states:
"It was itself named Albion, while all the islands about which we shall soon briefly speak were called the Britanniae.”
As late as 930, the English King Æthelstan was sometimes styled: "King and chief of the whole realm of Albion".
The name conjures up our nostalgia for King Arthur and the Nights of the Round table and the old myths of faerie.

"Brutus! there lies beyond the Gallic bounds
An island which the western sea surrounds,
By giants once possessed, now few remain
To bar thy entrance, or obstruct thy reign.
To reach that happy shore thy sails employ
There fate decrees to raise a second Troy
And found an empire in thy royal line,
Which time shall ne'er destroy, nor bounds confine.

Geoffrey of Monmouth tells tales of the giant Gogmagog and the history of the reclaiming of the soil of Albion from the old Faerie peoples. See Spenser's Faerie Queene. Shakespeare was referring to these early mythic times in ‘A Mid-Summer Nights Dream’ and King Lear was a mythic descendent of the first kings of Cornwall who defeated the giants in order to settle here.
These deep seated myths are compelling, for instance, recently Hellboy 9 (The Wild Hunt) revisited these themes.
So we have something old and often told. Tales that have been woven on an evening around camp fires and gas lamps, still being elaborated as 3D gaming adventures.
Perhaps this is where contextual study comes in. These old stories resonate deeply. It’s no accident that Tolkien was a professor of Medieval literature, his knowledge of these stories being woven into his own epic tale, which as we all know still grips people today as powerfully as it did when it was first written in the 1950s.
However what James Joyce was able to bring to our attention was that narratives occur everyday and that they can be mythic. (See his novel Ulysses)
Whilst it's true to say that a narrative is no more than a story, the important realisation is that when we tell or write a story, we all tend to use a very similar form and structure, no matter what the story and whether it is imaginary or not. Narrative is easily one of the most common varieties of social discourse and a day will not pass without you reading or hearing a story - or constructing one of your own.
From early childhood, we become accustomed to making sense of the complex events of the world through the simplifying and satisfying means of narrative. It has been suggested that we might even be born with such basic structures and forms embedded within our subconscious; they certainly have an enduring and unshakeable impact upon our psychology. Certainly, it is clear that as human beings we do have a need for security, control and order within our lives and narrative, is a means by which order and security can be created in what is, in reality, a disordered and potentially dangerous universe.
Recognising the links between the everyday and the world of myth can be a wonderful opening into new forms and a potential for audience engagement on the highest level. It is this that perhaps has most potential.

However here is another myth.



Jeff Astle of West Bromwich Albion

The start of a new phase

This week’s meeting was quite useful as a catch-up. Can I remind everyone that said they would start making posts to do this?
In the meantime I take on board the fact I ramble and that I could summarise the issues covered and bring them together by using a flipchart or whiteboard, so will try and remember to bring these along to the next session. The issue about taking notes though was important, so find below my notes on the session that can also be used as a reminder for you.
We began with the Guardian Guides to film, see the link at the bottom. http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/series/film-season-genre-guides The point here was that genre is subjective and that there are several ways that we can look at this. For instance no Western genre or Film Noir, there was then some discussion as to whether or not Film Noir is a genre or a style.
The main purpose of the session was to review the fact that as the last practical module was now finished (the titles sequence animation) how well had the contextual information introduced supported this. Was theory really being used to support practice?
The history of type lecture, was it seemed useful and some people had already written interesting reviews of opening sequences. In particular the text on the cinema as door seemed to have been a useful support. The session on embodied meaning and how to discuss/analyse movement had perhaps been less useful. I reminded everyone though that this needed to be linked with the resources already posted in particular ‘Key works when trying to write about film techniques’ is there to remind you that camera angle etc needs to be linked to other descriptive terms when analysing short sections of film.
The main issue though was to check where you now were and the two new modules were discussed. One to develop a ‘pop’ video and the other to develop a short character animation.
We then opened these areas up for discussion. These were some key points.
Pop video. There are several ways we could deepen the discussion around this.
History. History can be something that just looks at the specific nature of pop videos, starting with perhaps Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. But this doesn’t include early Dylan (Subterranean Homesick Blues) or the fact that the musical is integral to an understanding of film’s history. The first ‘talking film’ The Jazz Singer, of course foregrounding the issue. We then discussed the issues surrounding ‘silent film’ and the fact that these were not really silent and that Steven Severin had recently performed his new score for Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet at the Hyde Park cinema, there was some interest in how his early Siouxsie and The Banshees work could lead to this. Essentially though the point about the discussion was to open out the context for thinking about music and film.
The context issue was returned to in a more general discussion about the background of ‘how to be inventive’ or ‘how to use context change’ in developing ideas. This created another digression. But perhaps useful to remind everyone who didn’t take notes on what that was.
We looked at a seminal moment for contextual change which was created in the late 19th century by Comte de Lautréamont, his poetry collection, Les Chants de Maldoror and Poésies, had a major influence on modern literature, particularly on the Surrealists and the Situationists. The key line from one of his poems I introduced was, “The chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella”. Another early advocate of contextual change we looked at was Raymond Roussel, in particular his book ‘Impressions of Africa’. (This was text where we saw the traveller discovering a tribe that told the time by looking at wind direction) Finally I introduced Alfred Jarry his character Ubu and the science of Pataphysics, all of which helped to lay the foundations for Surrealism. The point being that all you need to do to change a context is to follow the implications of a chain of thought and ‘logic’ can lead you to a position that seems illogical. This is just another way of being creative.

All this was simply about how to not end up making a clichéd pop video.
The other area of discussion was the character development. Quite a few people were into comics and the text I was referring to was Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, which is a great read because it is written by a practicing comic artist.
The ‘what people are into’ area was opened out a bit more because a lot of people were into science fiction and horror and last year everyone had looked at the Uncanny. We tried to open this out a little further as it seemed that some people might well want to write about horror. I went through the related concepts of the Abject, the Other, cognitive dissonance, Burke’s notion of the sublime and how all these things overlap.
A good background text is: Royle, N (2003) The Uncanny: An Introduction Manchester: MUP
There are chapters on the death drive, deja-vu, "silence, solitude and darkness", the fear of being buried alive, doubles, ghosts, cannibalism, telepathy and madness.
One final area we looked at was narrative and story. Again one of the key resources was pointed to, the book was: Booker, C (2004) The seven basic plots: why we tell stories. London; Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd
Next session will be a lecture on Communication theory.