Quixotic Bravado by Josh Babetski

Recent tweets to http://twitter.com/quixado:

• Today’s Mission: Buy HD video camera or face certain death.
• T only sings when she doesn’t think I’m in earshot. She’s in the kitchen making angels jealous of her voice while doing Xmas gift stuff.

Recent tweets to http://twitter.com/quixado:

• @mahalotodo: Can you add a page on the "Uncanny Valley?" Just wrote a post on it, couldn’t link to Mahalo; made me think to submit it.
• Neighbors with small yard across street have huge inflatable Santa band in front and a huge inflatable Santa train on side. Tackyness FTW!

Over the weekend I was watching The Polar Express. A holiday CGI/motion capture film from 2004 by Robert Zemeckis and starring Tom Hanks in pretty much every role. This was the first time I’d seen it. The story is cute and the scenery and graphics are great, the problem is that all of the characters are creepy looking.

Why are they so creepy? The film suffers from the Uncanny Valley theory. In a nutshell, this hypothesis states that as computer generated humans become more real-looking, the more apt your brain is to pick out the subtle flaws and the more disturbing they will look.

In an interview for “How Stuff Works” called “The Artificial Intelligence of Halo 2“ Chris Butcher, AI mastermind for the game explains it best:

“As characters become more photo-realistic, you start to believe in them more and more. With humans characters, you get to a certain point of realism. What happens is there are characters that are so realistic you want to believe they are actually human. Then you notice their deficiencies. They have very plastic skin or very wooden eyes. All of the sudden they just become creepy. They are like zombie people, rather than appealing computer people. The appeal of the character rises, then drops dramatically, then rises again as you approach photo-realism.”

The production quality of The Polar Express was good; why didn’t any of the animators stop to tell Tom and Bob the inherit problem with the character design? Who knows. It’s likely they were hoping for an end-result that was realistic without falling into the valley. Maybe I’m exception in thinking they didn’t make it. The geniuses at Pixar know better, even the DreamWorks/PDI crew I think know better. This is why the humans in their films look more like 3D cartoon characters than real humans. You’ll find the family from The Incredibles more realistic than you will Tom Hanks as a Conductor.

So if you, like me found something very off-putting about The Polar Express, now you know why.

Recent tweets to http://twitter.com/quixado:

• For some reason I find myself yelling "We love you Chicago" at the TV anytime I’m watching a movie set there. Is that bad?
• Office Guitar Hero III obsession is about to overtake the Nintendo Wii obsession in 3…2…1…
• Just seen on a sweatshirt: "A team effort is a lot of people doing what I say." Genius!

Recent tweets to http://twitter.com/quixado:

• wing night : check!
• The office Wii addiction is growing!
• Today’s unconnected topics I spent my day on: "Wish List" and "Meta Blog." Oh and finally got some Xmas shopping done over lunch.

The icon for .Mac Synch mysteriously appeared on my menu bar today. This is odd because I’m not a .Mac user. I can only assume it was some wacky Leopard bug confused when I sync’d my iPhone earlier.

It wouldn’t come off and had no “quit” option.

Fortunately, the issue was quickly solved by this “Removing items from the menu bar” thread on Mac Forums: Cmd+drag the item off the menu bar.

In other menu bar news, I came across this menu extra for Time Machine today via one of Hicksdesign’s tweets.

Gibson is releasing a robot guitar which auto-tunes the guitar and can be preset with six different tuning types. Very sweet indeed.

I want one, but the Les Paul Silverburst is going to clock in at $2500 for the axe, and extra $900 for the self-tuning. Ouch!   I’ll stick with my dusty Washburn for now. For the rest of you, wait a few years for the price to come down and for it to come with a copy of “Guitar Hero IX.”

Recent tweets to http://twitter.com/quixado:

• Debating whether to bag wing night because of the snow and all of the bad drivers between here and there.

Recent tweets to http://twitter.com/quixado:

• At the orthodontist waiting for T. Told hygentist she didn’t follow instructions. Going to get it on way home.
• Just set DVR to record "Tin Man." How’d this not make my radar earlier?
• @Hicksdesign: la.la.la? For singers or loons?
• Twittering via site is unusable on Firefox 2. Word count JS can’t keep up with me at all. Not sure who to blame: FF bloat or Twitter QA.
• Loud music + lack of meetings = productive day at desk. Side effects: business proposal w/ references to seduction and Monty Python quotes.

Recent tweets to http://twitter.com/quixado:

• planning things to do in LA via voice chat during Halo3 matches.
• Awww… Took my mom to lunch. I’m a lock for son of the year!