Snow Angel Nine Ball: The Uncanny Valley

The concept for uncanny valley is important for animators and computer modelling of human characters, etc. According to roboticist Masahiro Mori, the core concept of the uncanny valley is that the more closely robots approximated human appearance and behavior, the more familiar they seemed to a human observer, until a point at which they resembled humans closely, but not perfectly. At this point, people would begin to react negatively to robots, citing feelings of eeriness or discomfort about their appearance. He called it "the uncanny valley," because of the way a graph depicting the correlation between familiarity and human likeness would dip suddenly and drastically, just before reaching perfect mimicry of the human appearance.

Image of the Uncanny Valley, courtesy of Karl MacDorman

Present computing power has developed to the point where simulation of 3D human characters especially in computer and video games are becoming more and more ubiquitous. Therefore the concept of the uncanny vally is important because it reminds animators of the "eerie models" that they may create, due to imperfect modelling of computer characters. Incorrect lip synching of characters and their speech can also be a problem. Remember that in warcraft 3, the main icons of the characters when speaking in the bottom left corner, do not sync with what is spoken? I really do feel odd about this effect.

In movies, this uncanny valley effect has also been applied, although it can be rather intentional, rather than a development flaw. For example, in horror movies such as Silent Hill, there is a monstrous figure in the film called Red Pyramid/Pyramid Head. He resembles human beings but his head is replaced by a pyramid instead of a human's head which is what makes him creepy.

A poster depicting the Red Pyramid.

Besides using the "Uncanny Valley" concept in horror movies and otherwise, the "Uncanny" effect can be used positively for humour and laughter such as in cartoons and simple animations. This example can be shown by speaking animals in movies. Although this does not model humans in any physical ways, the superimposition of human attributes onto animals, eg the ability to speak, makes animals seem to be able to relate more to humans especially children. An example is the animal film called Babe and its sequel Babe: Pig in the city. Making animals speak cause this film to be a rather popular children's movie although adults may enjoy it too as a family film.

1995 film Babe

1998 sequel Babe: Pig in the City

Inspired by Gamespot article at
http://www.gamespot.com/features/6153667/index.html?cpage=1#comments

A robot at the Toyama Robot Festival. It's called アクトロイ　ド-der (Akutoroi Do-der). Demonstrating the creepy effect of the Uncanny Valley.