2011-03-11

The Uncanny Valley

Uncanny valley - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The uncanny valley is a hypothesis regarding the field of robotics.[1] The hypothesis holds that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost 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.


A number of design principles have been proposed for avoiding the uncanny valley:
  • Design elements should match in human realism. [...]
  • Appearance and behavior should match ability. [...]
  • Human facial proportions and photorealistic texture should only be used together.  [...]





If you want something non-human to emote like a human, you can’t just slap human eyes on it and call it a day.


When cartoony characters move like humans, you get that cheap rotoscope/mo-cap look, but when real people move like cartoons you get the Black Hole Sun music video;


Cartoon characters with human skin stretched over them just look horrible:


Most Realistic Android Yet: Have We Passed the Bottom of the Uncanny Valley? | Discoblog | Discover Magazine



His name is Geminoid DK, and yes it’s a he: Henrik Scharfe of Denmark’s Aalborg University worked with Japan’s Kokoro entertainment company to create this avatar of himself. The android holds the distinction of being the first Geminoid modeled after a non-Japanese person (it’s also the first facial-haired bot of the lot).



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