[ericgearhart]

I think the "creepy" factor of the images is probably due to the "uncanny valley"... Pixar fought this effect when they were first rendering humans

"The uncanny valley is a hypothesis in the field of robotics and 3D computer animation, which holds that when human replicas look and act almost, but not perfectly, like actual human beings, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The "valley" in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot's human likeness."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley

[pavel_lishin]

Once they get over that barrier, though, it'll become much creepier for an entirely different reason.

[dolphenstein]

The net will be awash with G.I.R.L. 2.0 !

[mirkules]

Interestingly, one of the hardest aspects of human rendering is hands. Hands flex, bend and the skin stretches in ways which are difficult to represent mathematically, which is why in the late 90s and early 2000s (when human rendering started to emerge), most rendered human beings always wore gloves or were hidden from view entirely.

[tsunamifury]

This has nothing to do with the Uncanny Valley. This is creepy because masks add a deadening look to the face and we sense that. It seperates the person from the face.

[DLWormwood]

Read up on the "Uncanny Valley" again. Your example is one of the cases that lead to the development of the hypothesis in the first place. (The concept dates back to 1906 with a German paper.)