Uncanny Charlie

The subway system in Boston has a mascot named “Charlie”, a cartoon character who rides the train and reminds people to use the “Charlie Card”. With the exception of his face, he looks like a normal airbrushed graphic of a guy with a hat. But his face? Uh, it’s f’d up.

In case you don’t know yet about the Uncanny Valley, it refers to a graph devised by a Japanese robot maker. The graph shows typical reactions to human likeness in robots and other simulations. The more realistic the robot (or computer generated character) the more CREEPY it becomes….

..until it is so utterly realistic that you are fooled, and you respond to it as if it were a living human. But watch out. If the eyes do something wacky or scary, or if something else reveals the fact that it is just an animated corpse…DOWN you fall…. into the valley.

Anyway, I have a theory about the uncanny valley: it is just a specific example of a more general phenomenon that occurs when incompatible levels of realism are juxtaposed in a single viewing experience. So for instance, an animated film in which the character motions are realistic – but their faces are abstract – can be creepy. How about a computer animation in which the rendering is super-realistic, but the motions are stiff and artificial? Creepola. A cartoon character where one aspect is stylized and other aspects are realistic looks…not right. That’s Charlie’s issue.

Stylized faces are everywhere:

But when an artist takes a stylized line-drawn graphic of a face and renders it with shading, I consider this to be a visual language blunder. The exception to this rule of thumb is demonstrated by artists who purposefully juxtapose styles and levels of realism, for artistic impact, such as the post-modern painter David Salle.

The subject of levels of realism and accessibility in graphic design is covered in McCloud’s Understanding Comics. The image-reading eyebrain can adjust its zone of suspension of disbelief to accommodate a particular level of stylism/realism. But in general, it cannot easily handle having that zone bifurcated.

Charlie either needs a face transplant to match his jacket and hat, or else he needs to start wearing f’d-up clothes to match his f’d-up face.

Nano Avatars

(This blog post is re-published from an earlier blog of mine called “avatar puppetry” – the nonverbal internet. I’ll be phasing out that earlier blog, so I’m migrating a few of those earlier posts here before I trash it).

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The other day, Jeremy Owen Turner told me about NanoArt. Here’s a cool nano art piece by Yong Qing Fu, described in Chemistry World.

We started imagining a nano virtual world. Jeremy pontificates on avatars as works of art, avatars that can take on alternate forms, including nano art. I started thinking about what an avatar that consisted of a molecule might be like.

Some illustrations of the hemoglobin molecule look a bit like the flying spaghetti monster. Which reminds me, Cory Linden’s avatar in Second Life is based on the flying spaghetti monster.

We’ve seen avatars hanging out among virtual molecules…

but what about avatars that ARE molecules? Stephanie H. Chanteau and James M. Tour of Rice University created anthropomorphic molecules.

But I’m not so interested in how people make anthropomorphic molecules. I’m interested in avatars that live a molecule’s life. Check this out…

A scanning tunneling microscope (STM) is set up in a magnificent auditorium.

The microscope’s subject matter is projected onto a giant video screen. An audience of thousands watch as a team of five molecule-avatar controllers sit with computer mice and keyboards and mingle in a virtual world that is actually not virtual. In the middle of all the flamboyant machinery is a tiny nano-stage, a performance dance floor where five molecules show something rather strange and new

Since the STM can be used for atom manipulation as well as visioning (a consequence of the Observer Effect), the very technology for seeing the avatars is used to control them.

The audience collectively winces as the avatars try to, um, walk. Okay, maybe walking isn’t the right word. What exactly do these avatars do? They combine to form supermolecules. They jump and twitch. They split and reform. They blink and chirp. They fall off the edge of the stage and accidentally get stuck on carbon atoms. It may not be elegant. But hey it would be so cool to watch.

When the performance is done, the avatars take a bow…or something. The audience applauds with a standing ovation. A new genre is born. Constraints define creative boundaries and therefore creativity. And the limited repertoire of molecular interactions define the social vocabulary of these agents. Kind of reminds me of Flatland.

Avatars are embodiments of humans (or human intention) in virtual worlds.

“Seeing” a molecule is a problematic term, in the same sense that “seeing” a planet in a distant star system is a problematic term. It’s not “seeing” on a human scale. It’sprosthetic seeing. And so, just like a software-based virtual world, there must be arenderer.

Our most distant ancestor is a molecule that accidentally replicated and thus started the upward avalanche that is called Evolution. Dennett’s intentional stance can be applied on all levels of the biosphere. Molecular avatars represent the most basic and primitive expression of agentry. And unlike the constraints of C++, Havok, and OpenGL, in virtual world software programs, the constraints in this molecular world are real.

It may yield some insights about the fundamentals of interaction.