Dead eyes in King Kong
Quite an amusing article in Wired about high resolution (TV wise) characters that look like zombies. Clive Thompson talks about the uncanny valley which I have explored in the past.
Interestingly the new high def xbox 360 version of the game in question seems to have a completely different and lower quality set of characters than the PS2 version, odd. Anyway, I wont hold my breath waiting for the industry to wake from its slumber but I am always happy to see their customers pointing out the glaring deficiencies in their products ;)
December 8th, 2005 at 2005-12-08, 01:47 UTC
That is one spooky character (ed.), thats for sure. Of course, Naomi Watts is probably so in real life, but the game really brings out the ghoul in her eyes.
So the question is, can the star system be imported to games? Can the likenesses of real actors, preferably those doing the voices, be imported in digital form? Maybe representational graphics which signifiy the more notable features of said actor is the way to go, to avoid the creep factor.
December 8th, 2005 at 2005-12-08, 09:23 UTC
Well, of course the point I am usually making is that is is the characters *behavior* that is eqaully important, if not more so.
The point of the article I link to is that the likeness is great, but we are at a stage now where we have great looking zombies. So without the kind of autonomous behavior and level of detail that we can produce characters like these will actually turn users off. They will fall into the uncanny abyss.
It does not matter if your model looks and even sounds indistingushable from real life if the eyes dont move, or they move in a sporadic animation fashion.