I'm an animation student so I'v had to look into this a lot. Its really fascinating how the slightest unnatural movement or feature can throw away hours of work.
heres my fav video demonstrating the uncanny valley. This guy really well explains the whole topic, aswell as adding some humour. Check out his other vids as well, theyr all pretty enlightening.

In my opinion, Video Games are a unique medium where they don't always have to have a face that looks 100% 'real'. Just look to games like Final Fantasy, Dead or Alive or World of Warcraft and you'll see that its even preferred that they have a different style over 'reality', even in their CGI cutscenes.

However, when speaking of the in game graphics, that is the graphics of the gameplay when controlling the characters, I feel the real problem game developers are having is trying to capture the motion of characters. For years now, graphics have been making leaps and bounds each generation. And we're coming closer and closer to being able to mimic thousands of facial expressions and real time events without even needing CGI cutscenes.

However, more and more, the major problem has been the way these characters move. The characters still move with set patterns and even with those set patterns, the 'uncanny valley' if you will, or as I call it, the 'programmers limitations' shine through. We're still seeing the same arm motions, the same head bobbing and the same running animations as we saw over 15 years ago. Did some group of programmers, possibly at Naughty Dog and Rockstar, come out and make ALL the motion animations for 90% of the games out there? Because they seem to be showing up across the board, and unless you're working on an obscure Wii title, a PC exclusive or a 2D game, they're mostly all the same. From the jerking gun twist in Mass Effect to the sliding run in Halo, this is what I truly call the 'Uncanny Valley'. And I think game developers should stop worrying so much about how games look and focus more on how characters move and interact.

Hey CGI,
Any idea if the effect of the uncanny valley be diminished through exposure?

Also, do people who grew up watching CGI and playing video games have a different response to animation in the uncanny valley?

i find this pretty uncanny: http://www.motionportrait.com/about/TIminoriHair.swf

The biggest problem i had yet with computer generated humans, was in the Movie "Beowulf" for me the people remined me too much about the humans in "shrek" to take the movie seriously.

hey CGI, really good thread. I am very impressed. Do you study this for a living?

I'm hoping in the next few years peoples interest bends towards stylization rather than photo realism... mostly as I suck at 3D animation, and I want a job! lol.

Always very interesting.

Kinda reminds me of one episode of Game Overthinker, you can kill waves of enemies in a game with rifles, shotguns, knifes, etc. but you can't break down a door with any of that. I've always preferred stylized titles to realistic ones but eh, this was an interesting read. Thanks for sharing again, Terrance.

Indeed. When it comes to the Uncanny Valley, the first things I notice are the eyes and the mouth. The movement of these two facial features are crucial to make something "believable" as a human being... and if something is off (even slightly) I'm quick to notice. Take your link for example (the one that follows the mouse). Most of the facial features are fine, but when the "person" blinks or smiles (especially the smile, ugh!) you can tell that there's something off. Heck, even the picture above it... it's pretty incredible for sure... but there's something just not right about the mouth... I dunno.

This is what impressed me about the movie Avatar so much. Yes, there's some stylization going on that (intelligently on James Cameron's part) masks some faults of present day CGI technologies. However, I took careful watch of the eyes and the mouth of the characters... and I could never find a flaw that took me out of the movie experience (there was that last shot where Jake opens his eyes... It wasn't quite right.) But other than that, I'm not thinking to myself "Man, that's some great CG work!", I'm just watching (and enjoying) the movie, and that's what impresses me most.

I mostly get irritated by the movements of the body, though faces do tend to look creepy every once in a while too. The thing that gets me most in video games (this includes Heavy Rain, from what I saw in the demo) is model behaviour when running into a wall or some other obstacle.