It'd be great if she had a chameleon tongue that, at intervals, would whip out and try and catch the mouse pointer.

Somehow, no idea why, that seems really appropriate.

It is because of the lack of fluid motion between eye and neck transitions, she moves like a Chameleon.

It must have something to do with those beady little red eyes. They're weirding me out. Alas, great interaction and it runs smoothly.

This is not a rendering, it's just some texture scaling and layering...

It's fairly well done, but it's made of photographs, not 3D. I'd expect a site-full of geeks to be able to tell... You can easily spot that the distortion of the hair and stuff involves scaling of textures, not rendering.

OP said "rendering", not "3D rendering".

This is at least three years old: http://www.whatheck.com/2008/04/creepy-girl.php

Uncanny how if you thrash the mouse, her eyes thrash at inhuman speed. Some kind of damping would help it be more natural?

That's not just the uncanny valley, that's the uncanny canyon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley

The bloodshot red eyes really aren't helping. Amazing though.

How was the rendering done? I guess that some facial features are made from blended texture mapped polygons (the hair and the neck). The face and the eyes might require some other tricks.

What amazes me is how efficient the rendering is. It uses flash for rendering and is running fast on my netbook. If this could be taken into 3D games, it would make the game characters much more realistic/scary.

Well I think it's over 4 years old. At the time I read something about it and I think they were stacking 2D images fading and scaling them. As I remember well there was no 3D involved.

Did a quick search but I can't find the article.

Why this can't be used in games? First, you can't change the viewing angle because it's not full 3D. Secondly, the lighting is static (from photograph setting) and thus the shading remains static all the time. In addition, facial animations will be limited.

I have to say though that bad looking characters in games are usually fault of the artist, not the underlying technology.

There could be places you could use it (think of the unit portraits in RTS games like Starcraft).

Not to say it would be worth the effort, but there are niche use-cases.

The site http://www.motionportrait.com/e/ seems to be the author it's down too. This I think is another implementation though http://labs.mppark.jp/hige/

Reminds me of that one Microsoft search site that was interactive with some lady at a desk, used to launch Bing or something. From 2008 I believe. it was http://ms (name of chick).com I remember.

Also, there were other swfs like this from way back on ol feanor's directory: http://www.feanor.net/z0r/shock/

msdewey.com, best search engine ever :-)

Someone get this man a medal. And apparently this was back in 2006, which is a little scary.

This technology actually sees some use on Japanese TV http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDvIJtqQWwk#t=131s I instantly thought of this when I saw the characteristic head-swaying

Reminds me of this version from years ago.

http://b.bngi-channel.jp/psp-haruhi/sos_pop03.html

Wow, that's actually so much more comfortable to look at than the original. Because this ones a cartoon, it doesn't fall into the uncanny valley.

It seemed for a bit as if clicking around the mouth would make her smile ... or smile more often. Still hard to tell!

Very creepy indeed.

http://i55.tinypic.com/1zfo0fb.png

Yes, very creepy. And here eyes are bloodshot. She looks like she's been toke'n some virtual weed.

Why do you think they call it a "token ring" network?

She'd be far less creepy if her gaze remained stable while she moves her head.

She looks stoned out of her mind!