Ascending from the valley: Can state-of-the-art photorealism avoid the uncanny?

ABSTRACT Advancements in real-time rendering technology have continued to develop rapidly over the course of the last decade. Consequently, human likenesses have been represented virtually with increasingly impressive detail. There is evidence that this increased resemblance to real humans has an observable and wide-ranging set of effects on human perception, cognition and action in situations that involve digital characters. Studies that seek to advance the science of synthetic animated people have consistently aimed to measure and quantify changes in perceived emotional content mediated through artificial human likenesses. The present study has been built off of this work. The experiment outlined here was constructed to define and measure responses from human participants towards state-of-the-art photorealistic virtual humans under affected conditions. In particular, we sought evidence for changes in perceptions of human likeness, eeriness and attractiveness that could be observably dependent on conditions of photorealism and character representation.