Say hello to the uncanny valley:
I guess this graph (with annotation like "zombie" and "bunraku puppet") deserves a bit of explanation. We are looking at a plot of "how much a person empathises with a machine" (or familiarity) as a function of "how much like a human it appears".
Imagine an industrial machine, it has no human features and we don't feel anything for it, it's just a machine.
Moving further along the x-axis we get to cuddly toys and dolls, they definitely have human-like features. Big cute eyes, big heads, little limbs. Just the right combination of almost-human stuff to make you say "Awwww".
So why, if we keep on making things more realistic is it thought that people will begin to dislike them again. I'll let wikipedia speak for me here:
With that in mind watch this video. Does it (she?) look human? What is wrong? What is right?
This thing definitely feels like the uncanny valley to me, at times I can almost believe that it is human, but then the way it jerks around when bending and the lack of motion in its fingers just screams BAD!, and I think that it would actually be quite unpleasant to be around.
I guess this graph (with annotation like "zombie" and "bunraku puppet") deserves a bit of explanation. We are looking at a plot of "how much a person empathises with a machine" (or familiarity) as a function of "how much like a human it appears".
Imagine an industrial machine, it has no human features and we don't feel anything for it, it's just a machine.
Moving further along the x-axis we get to cuddly toys and dolls, they definitely have human-like features. Big cute eyes, big heads, little limbs. Just the right combination of almost-human stuff to make you say "Awwww".
So why, if we keep on making things more realistic is it thought that people will begin to dislike them again. I'll let wikipedia speak for me here:
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.With that in mind watch this video. Does it (she?) look human? What is wrong? What is right?
This thing definitely feels like the uncanny valley to me, at times I can almost believe that it is human, but then the way it jerks around when bending and the lack of motion in its fingers just screams BAD!, and I think that it would actually be quite unpleasant to be around.
