What Is Uncanny Valley?

The uncanny valley is a thing that happens in the human mind. It's when we're confronted with something human-like, like, "Hey! That's… not quite right." The uncanny valley is where a robot becomes so human-like that it makes us uncomfortable. It's like seeing a cartoon character who looks like a natural person, but something about them still seems off. It is still just a hypothesis. It's not like there's been some significant study conducted on this or anything, but here's what we know. A theory proposed by engineer Prof. Mori in 1970 is that if a robot or animated character looks almost, but not precisely, like a natural person, it will cause a feeling of unease in observers. The human eye is naturally accustomed to reading facial expressions and movements. So when it comes in contact with something close to the real thing but isn't the same, there is a moment of confusion. The same principle applies to graphics and inanimate objects as well. Mori was trying to figure out why we find some robots creepy and others just plain adorable. He created a graph that plotted people's reactions to objects that gradually increased their human-like appearance to study this phenomenon. What do you know? He discovered that as the object became more human-like, people's affinity for it grew until it reached a certain point where it became so human-like that it started looking weird and off-putting. The result was an immediate drop in affinity followed by a rapid rise on the other side of the graph, creating a shape that looked like a "V" or a valley. The uncanny valley is such a phenomenon that it occurs when something seems almost human but not quite. For example, Pixar's Wall-E and Eve are adorable little robots with big eyes and pretty mouths. Make them slightly more human-like, and they become creepy.