Devlog 02-01
A new group, and new technology to explore! While I really enjoyed the Roblox project, it is sadly time to put that away. I wasn’t the only one in the group struggling to figure out what to do. It seems like all of us put our best idea for the first week! While looking for something to do, one member stumbled upon Unreal’s Metahumans.
From the brief investigation I saw, metahumans are supposed to be highly realistic avatars for cinematics and games. However, that is not what interested me. I wasn’t interested in how they could go right. I wanted to know how they’d go wrong.
How? Well, if you don’t know by now, there is a little something in design known as the uncanny valley. This valley dictates the fine line between believable and creepy and is typically reserved for human-like characters. I want to know how well the general public is taking it. It doesn’t matter how good the tech is if nobody likes the end result.
So, I got to looking. Most of the articles I found concerning metahumans and the Uncanny Valley (See link 1) boasted that metahumans would successfully cross the barrier. If the metahumans are supposed to break the boundary between fiction and reality, I wanted to see how close people have gotten in the past, and the issues that have arisen from it.
First stop, Miquela Sousa (Link 4). She is an Instagram model advertised as an AI. I do not know if that is true. But what I do know is I do not like her. Something about her face disturbs me. And faces are what the uncanny valley thrives on. Next is Ana, a mascot created by the company that made pubg. She’s interesting. She has a music video, and I noticed that a lot of the shots hide her face. I don’t think that’s an accident. Next is a YouTuber called CodeMiko (Link 3). The first thing that stuck out to me was her eyes. They are noticeably larger than the previous two examples, allowing her to rest outside of the valley.
Comparing the faces of the previous three examples to the metahumans videos, I was surprised. I genuinely have no idea who in the video is real or who is fake. As far as I know, given the way they move, they could all be fake. And that concerns me. I was hoping I’d be able to tell a difference! The eyes are of a similar size to a human, however it looks like there are some cases where they are enlarged. One source I found (See link 2) claimed the metahumans were going to lead to a lot of uncanny valley moments, but said the teeth were really good.
If this is the future of modeling… then I am all for the ride…
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