29 May 2008

The "uncanny valley" explained

"The uncanny valley is a hypothesis that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost, but not entirely, like actual humans, 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 lifelikeness…

Mori's hypothesis states that as a robot is made more humanlike in its appearance and motion, the emotional response from a human being to the robot will become increasingly positive and empathic, until a point is reached beyond which the response quickly becomes that of strong repulsion. However, as the appearance and motion continue to become less distinguishable from a human being, the emotional response becomes positive once more and approaches human-to-human empathy levels…

…the idea of the uncanny valley is "really pseudoscientific, but people treat it like it is science." Sara Kiesler, a human-robot interaction researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, questioned uncanny valley's scientific status, stating, "We have evidence that it's true, and evidence that it's not." Roboticist Dario Floreano stated that uncanny valley is not based on scientific evidence, but is taken seriously by the film industry due to negative audience reactions to the animated baby in Pixar's 1988 short film Tin Toy.”

(Click to enlarge image. Text and graph from – where else – Wikipedia)

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