The Uncanny Valley by Eric Silva
Filed under: Misplaced Thoughts
In 1970, Masahiro Mori described a concept called the uncanny valley that relates the emotional response of humans to the realism of robots, animated humans, etc.
Image courtesy of Masahiro Mori
The graph shows that people's emotional responses to human like objects, images, or animations gets better as realism increases, until the uncanny valley is reached, where people generally start to get "creeped out."
W. W. Norton has a good essay on the uncanny valley and how it relates to movie special effects. They make a good comparison, The Polar Express vs. The Incredibles. Here are some screen grabs they posted ...