steve barrett

Is this creepy or what?

http://puscifer.com

I’ve always loved watching the progress of our endeavor to create replicas of ourselves as accurately as possible. Whether it’s an animatronic robot with silicone skin and a pulley system controlling its eyelids or a completely digital representation consisting of points, polygons, and pixels. We sure have come a long way from a 48 pixel Mario bouncing on mushrooms; modern day computer models convey emotion through facial expressions like wrinkles in the forehead and subtle eye movements in ways that are nearly identical to our own. It will be the convergence of the mechanical, structural, and programmed motions that truly lead to a replica so close we cannot tell the difference. It won’t be long.

Got a plumbing emergency?

You’re looking at Julio, a robot singing to a recording of David Byrne of the Talking Heads. Julio was built by David Hanson and chronicled on Hanson’s blog. Hanson has a great collection of other videos at his website. David says he designed Julio to study the “uncanny valley.” Instead of giving you a wonky description I’ll just include the wikipedia low-down

The uncanny valley is a hypothesis that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The “valley” in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot’s lifelikeness….

…The phenomenon can be explained by the notion that, if an entity is sufficiently non-humanlike, then the humanlike characteristics will tend to stand out and be noticed easily, generating empathy. On the other hand, if the entity is “almost human”, then the non-human characteristics will be the ones that stand out, leading to a feeling of “strangeness” in the human viewer. In other words, a robot stuck inside the uncanny valley is no longer being judged by the standards of a robot doing a good job at pretending to be human, but is instead being judged by the standards of a human doing a terrible job at acting like a normal person.

I find this to be a pretty interesting concept. Something so close to real it’s harder to personify than a cartoon? It’s as though people have an easier time humanizing an object if its obviously not real than they do personifying a 99% accurate recreation.

The TWIP is a photoshop contest based on MSNBC’s “This Week in Pictures” series. Photoshop entries are supposed to be funny and original and somehow incorporate on of the TWIP series photos.

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After: **Click to animate**

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After: **Click to Animate**

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This video is the making of Pontiac’s Spy Hunter Commercial for the G8.