Digital Pengins and the Uncanny Valley 10/28/09

I found an article at Variety about the Digital Penguins in the movie “Surf’s Up.” They talked about the movie’s Mockumentary nature leads to characters being interviewed by the quote unquote cameraman and had close-ups. They talked about how Sony needed to draw and animate the characters more like 2D characters as opposed to traditional 3D models. While I think the art style choice is interesting, this discussion made me want to look into the idea of the “close-up” in films.

I looked at Wikipedia and saw that the earliest filmmakers did not use close-ups for the most part and that there is even argument among historians in regards of who was the first filmmaker to use the close-up. I also saw that in movie theory, the close-up is often intended to distinguish main characters from the rest of the fray.

To go back to the initial discussion, this high-detail shot or scene would require either CGI models with incredible detail and fidelity, or a decision to go with a flatter look. Sony went with the flatter look, which helps them avoid what is called the Uncanny Valley where a fake image gets so close to reality that the small details that are not real make the image jarring and almost uncomfortable to look at. A close up of an almost-real Penguin talking to the camera would have likely been painful for the family-audience that Sony was aiming for.

Example of the Uncanny Valley

With all of this in mind, I think that as technology gets closer and closer to producing life-like images, CGI movies will actually go further away from realism, stylistically, so they avoid the issue of the Uncanny Valley. Once computers are capable of rendering a completely realistic human without any of the issues of the Uncanny Valley like movement or emotions that look just “a little bit off”, then a shift back towards realistic CGI people will happen.

Digital Candy… Tastes like Binary 10-28-09

I found this candy at stupid.com and it belongs here. A person can order gum that is shaped like pieces of technology, such as a Game Boy, a computer mouse, or a DVD.

Given the size of the gum relative to the size of the hand in the image, the gum is unrealistically big. The average size of a piece of gum is about the size of a nickel or so. The Game Boy gum alone is the width of the hand’s four fingers! It is impractical to chew this gum because you either are going to have a piece of gum the width of your fingers in your mouth or are going to have to rip up the gum and wrap up the remainder. Look at this image of various types of gum. The Game Boy gum is the width of stride package or the 5 gum package! There’s a reason why an average piece of gum is a nickel in diameter, is long and thin, or is thick and short. These gum manufacturers know that their consumers don’t want to save part of their gum for later, they want the whole piece and the only purpose of the wrapper is to cleanly dispose of a flavorless piece.

As a novelty piece, it works or could be fun, but it’s just too big to enjoy through its intended purpose, chewing.

As a practical food, it may be more reasonable to make technology based gummy fruit-flavored foods, like gummy bears but with iPods and laptops, but keep within the traditional size of those snacks. I did a google search for Tech Gummy Fruit and could not find any results that would suggest that these snacks already exist, but they would be delicious.

Feet First into Hell... or Halo 10-7-2009

FYI: For the sake of discussing thematic elements of this game, I will end up revealing story elements. I will try to avoid anything major unless it is relevant to what is discussed.





Halo 3: ODST is Bungie's latest foray in their acclaimed Halo franchise. However, from the first moments of actual playtime, you realize that this game is unlike every Halo game made yet.

In previous Halo games, the player stepped into the power-armor of the Master Chief, a genetically enhanced super-soldier, a SPARTAN in the fiction of the series. The player is essentially a walking tank, with enough solo lethality that he or she would never fear the enemy characters. In Halo 3: ODST, you play as an ODST (Orbital Drop Shock Trooper) called "The Rookie." Unlike SPARTANs, ODSTs are not super soldiers. They are human, even if they are the best of the normal humans. This distinction sets up most of what makes ODST unique.

Bungie clearly struggled with the concept of making ODST feel different while still feeling like Halo. Many of the gameplay changes are cosmetic or revert the gameplay style back to that of the original Halo game. For instance, falling from a great height will hurt you. While you don't have shields, you have "stamina" which works the same way where you have a recharging protection before your health starts getting lowered. Your health does not recharge, meaning if you start taking damage when your stamina is lowered, you need to find health packs to heal. The enemies also deal more damage now, so that what was cannon fodder from Halo: Combat Evolved to Halo 3 is now lethal.

The biggest change of all is one that only the hardcore Halo fan will notice and it is the one that makes the game feel the most different. You feel alone in ODST. You are not a god in power armor. You do not fight with a squad. In fact, you spend most of the game trying to find what happened to your squad and meet up with them in the last two missions of the game. The largest portion of the game takes place during the night in a vacated, destroyed, city, with most of the lighting deactivated by an EMP or destroyed by the battles that were taking place beforehand. Unlike the other Halo games where you had an AI companion inside your helmet talking to you, your only companion as The Rookie is the city's highly damaged AI, the Superintendent.

Another difference is the flow of the game itself. You play as The Rookie in the destroyed city of New Mombasa, looking for clues for what happened to your squad. The clues that you find activate flashbacks where you play as the squad-member which feel like Halo. After you have played through the first four flashbacks, it is entirely up to the player as to what order you play the remaining missions. If the player follows the waypoint system, he or she will follow the story of the squad in a more natural order leading up to the point in time where the last flashback you play is parallel to The Rookie finding out about them.

Overall, I think ODST succeeds at feeling different from the previous games while not feeling like a game not attached to the Halo franchise. It ends up being one of the frist games I have played in a very long time that conveyed a mood to me in such a strong way.