The Uncanny Valley

[Calobi]

An artificial looking robot (say the one's from that Will Smith Movie... It wasn't AI... oh I can't remember) are going to make us naturally uncomfortable based on human survival instinct response to people with deformities.

Is your movie "I, Robot"? I bet it is.

I think the uncanny valley will be less a problem with gamers than some other people, only because we've seen a lot of advancement in false-humans' appearances than other people. For instance, we've gone from 8-bit Mario (bad example) to Fable and Mass Effect. To an extent, gamers are already in the uncanny value because no game (at least that I've played) has successfully breached the valley. The people who made Mirror's Edge claim that they've done it, but the general public doesn't know for a fact that they have yet.

This doesn't mean we'll be immune to the effects of robots and such being in the uncanny valley, as seeing something on a computer/television screen is different than in actual 3 dimensions, but my wager goes to us being slightly less repulsed because we'll be able to say, "Well, that face reminds me of how they did faces in {insert game of choice here}."

 

[Xhumed]

The problem is, the more human we make our robots appear, the more we will antropomorphise them, and thus attribute human emotions/ motivations to them, which means we will distrust/ fear them more and more as they get more and more human in appearance.

 

[Eyclonus]

The problem is, the more human we make our robots appear, the more we will antropomorphise them, and thus attribute human emotions/ motivations to them, which means we will distrust/ fear them more and more as they get more and more human in appearance.

Aka: "The Companion cube cannot talk, threaten or communicate with you. It has no emotions"


alright I buggered up that quote

 

[Anton P. Nym]

I think the creepiness comes from laziness. Poser users I'm looking at you. The closer some thing looks to being real the quicker our eyes discover what makes it unreal. For CG humans there is a tendency for the 1000 yard stare. Animators just don't feel like animating the little eye twitches that real humans make. So both eyes are locked 90 degrees from the plane of the face gazing into oblivion. Another laziness inducing horror is obvious key frames. When the character's entire body moves to a certain pose then stops and moves to another pose, you can tell the animator was not giving it his all.

They eye-twitch thing isn't necessarily laziness... processing and memory requirements might limit the number of animations a game can support, anyway. If we're talking CGI in film, though, then yes it's at the least an error.

The "obvious key frame" is indeed a sign of sloppy work.

And I know the uncanny valley exists, because I've gazed into it. Apparently as a toddler I was terrified by the appearance of the Apollo astronauts; the faceless helmets apparently pushed them into the valley for me. I've grown out of that, but it certainly does exist and the thresholds are certainly variable among different observers.

-- Steve

 

[Goenitz]

Aka: "The Companion cube cannot talk, threaten or communicate with you. It has no emotions"


alright I buggered up that quote

I miss my companion cube.... he was my only friend, why do I feel like some cake now?

 

[Anton P. Nym]

Just a thought, popping randomly into my head; the "scary clown" thing is probably a manifestation of the same phenomenon.

-- Steve

 

[Eyclonus]

Just a thought, popping randomly into my head; the "scary clown" thing is probably a manifestation of the same phenomenon.

-- Steve

Probably, clowns freak out children, Banraku puppets freak out children, actually Banraku freaks me out as well with some of the puppets...

Actually in a slightly tangental way Mamoru Oshii posits in his light-novel Blood the Last Vampire: Night of The Beasts, that the Uncanny Valley developed as a way for humans to protect themselves from chiropterans. Although due to the time period of the novel it doesn't say Uncanny Valley explicitly.