Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | about this site The Undead Zone: Why realistic graphics make humans look creepy (09 Jun 2004) The screwiest part of this phenomenon is that game designers pride themselves on the quality of their sepulchral human characters. It's part of the malaise that currently affects game design, in which too many designers assume that crisper 3-D graphics will make a game better. That may be true when it comes to scenery, explosions, or fog. But with human faces and bodies, we're harder to fool. Neuroscientists argue that our brains have evolved specific mechanisms for face recognition, because being able to recognize something 'wrong' in someone else's face has long been crucial to survival. If that's true, then game designers may never be able to capture that last 1 percent of realism. The more they plug away at it-the more high-resolution their human characters become-the deeper they'll trudge into the Uncanny Valley. Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2102086/ Read 22 more articles from Slate sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Does Time Change All? This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy