Uncanny Valley

The Uncanny Valley is a principle of robotics concerning the emotional response of humans to robots and other non-human entities. It was theorized by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in the late 1970s through psychological experiments in which he measured human response to robots of varying degrees of anthropomorphism.

This principle states that as a robot is made more humanlike in its appearance and motion, the emotional response from a human being to robot will become increasingly positive and empathetic until a point is reached at which the response suddenly becomes strongly repulsive. Thenceforth, as the appearance and motion are made to be indistinguishable to that of human being, the emotional response becomes positive once more and approaches human-human empathy levels.

This gap of repulsive response aroused by a robot with appearance and motion between a "barely-human" and "fully human" entity is called the Uncanny Valley. The name harkens to the notion that a robot which is "almost human" will seem overly "strange" to a human being and thus will fail to evoke the requisite empathetic response required for productive human-robot interaction.

The phenomenon can be explained by the notion that if an entity is sufficiently non-humanlike, then the humanlike characteristics will tend to stand out and be noticed easily, generating empathy. On the other hand, if the entity is "almost human", then the non-human characteristics will be the ones that stand out, leading to a feeling of "strangeness" in the human viewer.

Although originally applied only to robotics, the principle has been applied to computer-animation characters. The Uncanny Valley was considered by some to be the reason behind the difficulty in creating computer-animated characters. The principle leads to the conclusion that to generate a positive emotional response in human beings, it is often better to include fewer human characteristics in the entity, lest it fall into the Uncanny Valley. Critics argue, however, that there has been no evidence in animation or filmmaking for the existence of the Uncanny Valley, even though movie effects have gradually developed to the point when humans are digitally rendered realistically and without evoking negative emotions from the viewers. Proponents of this view argue that nowhere between 1970s and 2000s have moviemakers actually faced the challenge of the Valley.

Recently, American film critic Roger Ebert has applied the Uncanny Valley to the use of make-up and costumes of humanoid creatures in movies. However, there is no scientific evidence to support this yet.

Some roboticists have heavily criticized the theory as well, arguing that Mori had no basis for the right part of his chart, as human-like robots are only now technically possible (and still only partially). David Hanson, a roboticist who developed a realistic robotic copy of his girlfriend's head, called the idea of the Uncanny Valley pseudoscientific. Sara Kiesler, a human-robot interaction researcher at Carnegie Mellon University questioned Uncanny Valley's status as a dogma, noting that very little scientific evidence for it or against it is accumulated.