Uncanny Beauty

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...

Upending the Uncanny Valley

Although robotics researchers commonly contend that robots should not look too humanlike, many artforms have successfully depicted people and have come to be accepted as great and important works, with examples such as Rodin’s Thinker, Mary Cassat’s infants, and Disney’s Abe Lincoln simulacrum. Extending this tradition to intelligent robotics, the authors have depicted late sci-fi writer Philip...

Uncanny sociocultural categories

INTRODUCTION Humans are well adapted to their social environments. Experimental evidence suggests that humans are either born with, or quickly learn, the necessary affective and cognitive processes that allow them to recognize others, and to understand their mental states and social behavior. Mori’s (1970) proposal of an uncanny valley, which describes affective response as a function of distan...