theGIST Issue 12

Science in the Spotlight
It's July 2019, I'm sitting at my office
computer when my friend
rushes over to my desk. "Have you
seen the new Cats trailer?". He
grabs the mouse, opens a new tab,
and for 2 minutes and 48 seconds I
sit transfixed. An eternity passes.
The trailer finally ends and I'm left
speechless, staring at my screen.
What the hell did I just watch?
For those unfamiliar with Andrew
Lloyd Weber's back catalogue, the
source material for Cats is completely
bonkers, but these CGI cats
are taking it to the next level. The
trailer makes for uncomfortable
viewing; I've absolutely no desire to
watch the whole film. I'm reminded
of a disturbing movie I saw as a
child – The Polar Express (I still can't
bear to watch it). Maybe I've got a
low threshold but I find creepy CGI
deeply unsettling. I look at Twitter
and confirm I'm not the only one
who hates 'digital fur technology'.
Cats was freaking people out.
The CGI cats were repeatedly compared
to the stuff of nightmares.
Entertainment journalist Kristy
Puchko tweeted that the trailer
made her eyes bleed. People were
equal parts confused and horrified;
the producers' miscalculation was
spectacular. Don't get me wrong,
the animators achieved exactly
what they set out to do – they've
created convincing cat-human hybrids.
But perhaps these cats are a
little too convincing.
Producers should know by now
that people can find photorealism
disturbing. Let's return to The Polar
Express, the creepiest animated film
of the B.C. era (a.k.a. the period
'Before Cats'). Some of the worst
critic reviews focused on the "unnervingly
smooth" humans, calling
them "glaring impostors" and "as
blank-eyed and rubbery-looking as
moving mannequins -- the stuff of
nightmares, not dreams" [1]. The
nightmare comparison always
crops up. It's as if almost-realism
trips a switch in our brains; an
alarm goes off, alerting us that
something's not quite right. While
this is a relatively new issue for animators,
roboticists have been
grappling with this effect for
decades.
This phenomenon, coined the
'uncanny valley', was first described
by Japanese researcher Masahiro
Mori in 1970. Now, for those who
work with humanoid robots, it's
common knowledge that people
find designs creepy once they approach
a certain degree of anthropomorphism.
There's a balance to
be struck; we feel familiarity, even
empathy, for robots with faces [2] –
we find them cute (think of Pepper,
the customer service robot) – but if
the face is too human-like, we become
unsettled and distrustful. The
same rule applies in animation.
Empathy drops. That uneasy feeling
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