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This paper analyses the features of the 2021 software for the creation of ultrarealistic digital characters “MetaHuman Creator” and reflects on the causes of such perceived effect of realism to understand if the faces produced with such software represent an actual novelty from an academic standpoint. Such realism is first of all defined as the result of semio-cognitive processes which trigger interpretative habits specifically related to faces. These habits are then related to the main properties of any realistic face: being face-looking, face-meaning and face-acting. These properties, in turn, are put in relation with our interactions with faces in terms of face detection, face recognition, face reading and face agency. Within this theoretical framework, we relate the characteristics of these artificial faces with such interpretative habits. To do so, we first of all make an examination of the technological features behind both the software and the digital faces it produces. This analysis highlights four main points of interest: the mathematical accuracy, the scanned database, the high level of details and the transformative capacities of these artificial faces. We then relate these characteristics with the cultural and cognitive aspects involved in recognizing and granting meaning to faces. This reveals how metahuman faces differs from previous artificial faces in terms of indexicality, intersubjectivity, informativity and irreducibility. But it also reveals some limits of such effect of reality in terms of intentionality and historical context. This examination consequently brings us to conclude that metahuman faces are qualitatively different from previous artificial faces and, in the light of their potentials and limits, to highlight four main lines of future research based on our findings.
This paper analyses the features of the 2021 software for the creation of ultrarealistic digital characters “MetaHuman Creator” and reflects on the causes of such perceived effect of realism to understand if the faces produced with such software represent an actual novelty from an academic standpoint. Such realism is first of all defined as the result of semio-cognitive processes which trigger interpretative habits specifically related to faces. These habits are then related to the main properties of any realistic face: being face-looking, face-meaning and face-acting. These properties, in turn, are put in relation with our interactions with faces in terms of face detection, face recognition, face reading and face agency. Within this theoretical framework, we relate the characteristics of these artificial faces with such interpretative habits. To do so, we first of all make an examination of the technological features behind both the software and the digital faces it produces. This analysis highlights four main points of interest: the mathematical accuracy, the scanned database, the high level of details and the transformative capacities of these artificial faces. We then relate these characteristics with the cultural and cognitive aspects involved in recognizing and granting meaning to faces. This reveals how metahuman faces differs from previous artificial faces in terms of indexicality, intersubjectivity, informativity and irreducibility. But it also reveals some limits of such effect of reality in terms of intentionality and historical context. This examination consequently brings us to conclude that metahuman faces are qualitatively different from previous artificial faces and, in the light of their potentials and limits, to highlight four main lines of future research based on our findings.
Within the interdisciplinary context of the nineteenth century, the paper scrutinizes the relation between Paolo Marzolo’s theory of signs and Cesare Lombroso’s anthropological-criminal approach. Best known for his unfinished work Monumenti storici (1847–1866), Marzolo (of whom Lombroso calls himself a disciple) investigates, in his last Saggio sui segni (1866), the origin and development of languages by combining the positivist approach with an eighteenth-century encyclopedic Enlightenment perspective, as well as the earlier anatomist tradition. In his view, the human production, learning, and use of signs, resting upon sensory experiences and mnemonic activity, involves the process of imitation with a pivotal role of the speakers’ phonic, gestural, and facial expressions (i.e., physiognomy), related to geographical, linguistic, and anthropological differences among human individuals, as well as the cultural element of civilization. Conceived as case(s) of semiotic ideology rooted between linguistics and medicine, the Marzolo–Lombroso filiation shows an increasing correlation between race, language, and climate in the wake of social Darwinism and akin to other coeval physiognomic theories. In Lombroso’s perspective, a radical translation from a linguistic and phonic-semiotic field to an anthropological and somatic-semiotic plane seems inevitable, emphasizing the (para) scientific flavor and widening the gap between anthropometric and ethnoanthropological approaches.
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