Freud's Uncanny and Speculative Elegy

Arthur J. Viseltear: A Student's Elegy

Driving back from Professor Viseltear's funeral, a friend presented us with a paradox. By temperment and training that friend was a medical materialist; he believed in what he could see and study-in tissues and cells, molecules and atoms. Within such a world the spiritual seemed to have little foundation, and yet he wasn't ready to believe that with the ceasing of Professor Viseltear's heart hi...

Uncanny affinities

Uncanny Speech

As technological advancements allow for the representation of high fidelity, realistic, human-like characters within computer games, aspects of a character’s appearance and behaviour are being associated with the Uncanny Valley phenomenon. (A definition of the Uncanny Valley is provided in the first section of this chapter.) It seems that one of the main factors contributing to a character bein...

MB4-1 Is The Uncanny Valley An Uncanny Cliff?

The uncanny valley theory proposed by Mori in 1970 has been a hot topic in human robot interaction research, in particular since the development of increasingly human-like androids and computer graphics. In this paper we describe an empirical study that attempts to plot Mori’s hypothesized curve. In addition, the influence of framing on the users’ perception of the stimuli was investigated. Fra...

Speech Synthesis and Uncanny Valley

The paper discusses a hypothesis relating high quality textto-speech (TTS) synthesis in spoken dialogue systems with the concept of “uncanny valley”. It introduces a “Wizard-of-Oz” experiment with 30 volunteers engaged in conversations with two synthetic voices of different naturalness. The results of the experiment are summarized and interpreted, leading to the conclusion that the TTS uncanny ...