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Escape from the Uncanny Valley -why Avatar is groundbreaking

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The uncanny valley is the revulsion caused by robots and computer generated images that try to mimic human faces. It was coined in the 1970’s by Masahiro Mori (link) and is the reason why watching Polar Express makes me jump up and down like a rabid chimpanzee. CGI movies that maintain their cartoony-ness avoid this problem.

So it was with a bit of suspicion that I went to see Avatar, expecting to jump up and down like a rabid chimp as soon as those blue goat people got on screen. I was wrong. James Cameron understood this implicitly and created an image capture system that follows actors facial movements and maps it directly to the blue Navi’s. The actors are really acting and the computer generated animatronics are imbued with emotion that greatly exceeds that of the actual human actors.

Avatar is great in the way that Titanic was great. The main character in Titanic was the ship, and in Avatar, it’s the escape from uncanny valley. The script is a Disney princess movie on steroids, but the real reason you should see Avatar is this entirely new way of experiencing the world.

I have to add, I have always felt virtual reality won’t work until all five senses are involved and Cameron seems to understand it as well -to access the avatars, the characters lay down in an MRI machine -it is through electromagnetic manipulation of nerves that true telepresence will be achieved.

Elvis, by Wowee, straight from the Uncanny Valley

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Sony, the graveyard of media formats

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Sony’s ability to turn gold into lead has a long track record. It started with Betamax but continued with MiniDisk, Memory Stick, UMD, and now Blu-Ray. You’d think they won with Blu-Ray, beating back HD-DVD, but it was a pyrrhic victory of one army of muskets over another army of muskets -on the horizon is a bunch of guys with cruise missiles, machine guns, and Predator drones. If you go to the video rental store (they still have these, but not for long) you will see about two racks for Blu-Ray. Who wants to spend for that when you can get just about as good for a lot less. That’s what its all about -remember Pioneer’s LaserDisk? Videophiles cherish the quality and durability of this format that predated DVD’s, but it was a millionaire’s plaything. Not so much with Blu-Ray which is hampered by the fact that to get the movie, you have to go and buy the movie or order it and wait for it to be delivered. With Netflix, Hulu, and iTunes along with a host of others, satisfaction is immediate. I downloaded Star Trek in HD and watched it with great satisfaction in 720p on my HiDef computer monitor. 23inch monitor for two feet away is the front row.

Sony has too many competing interests and kills itself by handicapping its products. Or it fetishizes design over function and delivers actual 4,000 dollar laptops that can’t make a movie with their own digicamcorders (my personal experience). People sneer that MacBook’s don’t have BluRay, but do you want to spend the extra money for that blue plastic cover? Especially when you already own Star Wars in VHS and DVD?

People are getting the notion that content has value -not the plastic case or the shiny disk. This is where Sony fails in clinging to a dying business model rather than adapting. It is the giant three toed sloth struggling in a tar pit.