Skins -- Love 'em or Hate 'em?

I've heard people having lots of opinions about skins in Second Life. There's a huge demand for them now, but I thought I'd take a poll on what people really think about them!

Love em! We REALLY need for LL to give us an extra texture layer for skin though, so people can manage their own tatts, and skinnners can be more productive.

Personally, I like my avatar to wear make-up, tattoos and the like, but there is something about skins that freak me out. I couldn't quite understand why it was, until my SigOther mentioned something called The Uncanny Valley .

"Though originally intended to provide an insight into human psychological reaction to robotic design, the concept expressed by this phrase is equally applicable to interactions with nearly any nonhuman entity. Stated simply, the idea is that if one were to plot emotional response against similarity to human appearance and movement, the curve is not a sure, steady upward trend. Instead, there is a peak shortly before one reaches a completely human “look” . . . but then a deep chasm plunges below neutrality into a strongly negative response before rebounding to a second peak where resemblance to humanity is complete.

This chasm — the uncanny valley of Doctor Mori’s thesis — represents the point at which a person observing the creature or object in question sees something that is nearly human, but just enough off-kilter to seem eerie or disquieting. The first peak, moreover, is where that same individual would see something that is human enough to arouse some empathy, yet at the same time is clearly enough not human to avoid the sense of wrongness. The slope leading up to this first peak is a province of relative emotional detachment — affection, perhaps, but rarely more than that."

(See attached image)

I'm not dissing skins, since I believe that it's up to the player's taste to decide what they want their avatar to look like, but this is the way I feel about my avatar.

Ha, you know about the Uncanny Valley too! Cool... I've tried mentioning it around, even to some anime buffs, but I've got confused looks for the most part.

I wear a skin -- it's a Mistress Midnight skin. It's not quite the shade of "tan goth" (I embrace contradictions after all) I'd like it to be, but I really like the makeup and it's fantastic. Thanks, Mis.

I agree with Chip that more layers would be most welcome, so additional customizations can be made. An avatar is a way to express your individual creativity and show some part of you, manifested in a fantastic way.

I pretty much echo Kats' feeling exactly, with one additional statement:

For my personal avatar, despite the fact that it's essentialy 'human' (Well, humanoid. It's not an elf, actually despite what both people think and I seem to suggest in my little forum avatar... anyhow...), I don't think a skin could ever reall do it justice. It's better to have a little more abstract that more detailed but detailed in such a way it does it an injustice. And this would kind of be my view on regular photoskin type deals... The base SL avatar may not be all that realistic, but I have a great deal of flexibility in making it (within the realm of realistic it is capable of achieving) look like what I want. I loose this ability with Photoskins, which sort of lessens their appeal to me.

Uncanny valley is precisely why I opted for crazy anime proportions and Yu-Gi-Oh hair. (Although I was not intentionally thinking of Yu-Gi-Oh at the time. Honest.)

i don't wear a skin for the simple reason that i don't want people to have to download and render it. i already have custom eyes & clothing and i generally wear as little clothing as i can get away with. i'm just a big advocate of trying to accomodate other peoples frame rate as much a i can. jarod calls me old, or old fashioned, i can't remember which.

If you can't remember, that might suggest old, as opposed to old fashioned.

I don't wear a skin, but I think most of the ones made do look good. Props to the artists, they do good work.

Of course, not all av's with skins look better than non-skinned ones, I've seen some av's that look amazing and aren't using custom skins.

I wear a skin. I spent hours making it. For me personally its like wearing my own art. I refused to let anyone else make my skin. No matter how amazing chips were I was stubborn and held back untill I was ready to attempt my own.
Every time I look at my av I go "I made every little part of her she is my creation no one else's".

I know what you mean, Launa. I so enjoy making just about everything else I wear, I want to make my own skin, too (I just need to make myself DO it). In the meantime, I caved and bought a really great, relatively inexpensive skin by Munchflower Zaius. I much prefer the mostly hand-painted skins; the photo-realistic ones just... hmmm, yeah, creep me out a bit.

Custom skins don't add anything to how much your viewer has to download in terms of number of images. The only difference might be in file size since the skins tend to be detailed and don't compress as much. The server bakes together all of your skin, tatt, and clothing layers into single textures that get sent to each person you're in draw distance of. So unless you always wear things that everyone already has in their cache, a custom skin won't make a difference.

I am definitely in the "finds them creepy" camp - they remind me of embalmed corpses a lot of times. Granted, they have gotten better over time (though now that there is a market for them, you also find some really garish looking ones). I also find that skins for very light skin tones look the best. The variation in color on the skin does not look natural to me - a lot of the medium to dark skins look like they have scurvy. To each his or her own. Launa definitely has a beautiful skin, as does Mistress Midnight. I tend to just prefer something more subtle like Starley's makeup to a full body skin.

I'm pretty much in the same boat as Launa. Though I do admit Chip was quite an inspirational nugget in my attempt to make a skin for myself. It took weeks of tweaking to finally get happy with what I have; a silvery-grey vampire.

More power to the skinners! (maybe I'm just a custo freak though)

I'd have to say, that I'm on the freak out side of the skin thing.

Perhaps its my very faulty vid card, but the skins I've seen, aside from some really fantastic gothy face makeup, look like the person has dirty and smudged skin.

I've seen a few models that have some lovely skins, that look natural, and the shadings and so forth or subtle, but definitely THERE - but don't give that omg I forgot to take a bath for 3 weeks look.

I'm not in a rush to get a skin myself, I'm mostly contemplating trying some different makeup, and its hard to find nice one's for my avs skin tone. Plus I'm not exactly evovled yet (you know viva la evolutiong thang) and who my face says I am, is sure to keep changing

Also, I'm not sure if this is correct, but are skins supposed to make your avatar look more "real"? That's another reason for me not to get one! LOL as I've stated in another thread somewhere, I'm all about being UN-real in here or even anti-real.

I already AM real. I already have a being that looks like me: ME. I don't understand about coming into a place like SL with all the creative tools at our fingertips, and use them to make a little carbon copy of well...me.

I love me. I think me is HOT. But SL is my recreation and I would much rather be something else, or at the very least, the cartoon and very much idealized version of me while I play around up in here.

Then there is that whole Uncanny Valley thing. I guess that's what freaks me out the most, when you see someone with a very very realistic face....and yet...there is SOMETHING that...just....isn't quite...right...GAHHHHH!!

*runs off screaming*

LOLL

I voted in the "I don't wear a skin" category because honestly I don't care anough about my AV's appearance to spend that much money! They don't creep me out, however (except for Ryen's face... now that is creepy...)

I bought a great skin from Munchflower, but I haven't worn it yet other to play around in Appearance. Skins always seem to change the shape of my AV's facial features, and I like them the way they are.

It's actually a misconception that multi-layered clothing adds extra texture data. Basically, it works like this: your client downloads your avatar's clothing textures, tattoos, etc, from the server. It 'bakes' the textures, (layers the textures together) then RE-UPLOADS the combined texture data back to the server, where it is downloaded to everyone else. This is why you can sometimes see rendering glitches on other people's skins. For a while, you could frequently see parts of other people's UIs on their skirts.

Not wearing a photosourced skin layer is like not wearing underwear. It doesn't affect other people's framerates in the slightest.

I used to get SO freaked out with skins, but then I found a few that I really love, and now LOL I have over 30 different ones w00t!

I too find that everyone individually changes my facial features slightly, So now I have over 30 shapes too!

*sigh*

/ends being a slave to fashion

I'm with Willow, I have probably about the same amount of skins that I've accumulated since they started coming out.

However, I ADORE my Munchflower skin, it's by far the best in detail and shading that I've found, and I love the look it gives to my avis' face.

When inhabiting my human avie I usually wear Starley's skins, so far my favourite of any, but I haven't tried a number of the one's mentioned above yet.

Some I've tried have great body skin, but change my facial features too much so have fell out of favour with me. Others did admittedly look a little 'creepy' - must just be the varying ways of generating the skin, and also my personal taste.

I don't like giving up the ability to customise, I'd like to be able to fiddle with the makeup, skin-tone and other body surface features more readily myself, perhaps this is an area where SL features may 'catch up' to meet demand - I don't really know what the technical issues are here.

The expense of some of the skins makes it hard to experiment too wildly, though I understand it's a function of the work involved. The Munchflower and Nora skins look interesting, I may give them a whirl sometime.....

Going back to my SL skin looks kinda 'plain Jane' but perhaps that's because I never explored the full potential of it, hmmm, makes a note to fiddle with the sliders sometime....

Huh? *Doesn't understand why people try to explain a skin like advanced medical terminology and psycology.

Because in this case it is psycology. Many people in this thread (Myself included) share the exact same issue. It's a well-documented psycological issue that many people have problems with.

To boil the issue down to two sentances:

Many people have an issue with an artificial construct that is a very, but not totaly, believable representation of humanity. There is a nagging sense of wrongness that jars the mind, preventing either true immersion or a comfortable detachment.

It is the reason that despite the advance graphics technology availible today, human interface persona (Such as help wizards, automated newscasters like Annanova, and even to a lesser extent the CG movies that are all the rage right now) are almost always exceedingly stylized instead of hyper-realistic.

hmm..Skinpixelphoebia..interesting.