Ever been completely taken out of a serious or romantic moment just because of how dead-eyed a character looks?

They could be the most perfectly-rendered representation of a human being, but there’s just something about the way their eyes look that completely takes you out of the experience.

You’re not the only one, and according to fastcodesign, it could be decades before developers get it right.

“Across the video game industry, engineers are working to make eyes more realistic—or at least less creepy.”

“Despite all of our advancements in CGI and real-time physics, we’ve hit a wall. Call it the uncanny valley. Call it something else. But the eyes in games are terrible, and it’s holding back the believability of every character on the screen.”

What exactly is causing the setback?

It’s actually incredibly difficult to render an eye which are in fact mostly see-through and layered, meaning if something is remotely off it completely throws off the viewer.

It is possible however – it just requires an immense amount of processing power and technique to get it just right.

What’s almost impossible however, is the tricking the audience into believing that an eye is real.

Call it the uncanny valley effect or simply a sixth sense, “because humans have evolved to read and communicate so much through the subtlest movements of eyes, we’re hyper-aware of their behavior.”

That means that no matter how time and effort goes into creating a perfect set of video game eyeballs, none will ever match up to the real thing in our eyes.

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