The Uncanny Valley

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 to illustrate the point.

The Polar Express

The Incredibles

The Incredibles characters seem more human in certain ways, even though they’re less realistic.

Another example is Osaka University’s Repliee Q1 robot.

Check out the video of the Repliee Q1 to experience the uncanny valley.