uncanny valley
noun
a disturbingly lifelike aspect of something (such as a robot)
What does uncanny valley mean?
Uncanny valley refers to a certain level or stage of lifelikeness (as of a doll, computer-animated character, robot, etc.) that is past the point of being impressive or endearing and is instead disconcerting, creepy, or just off.
Examples of uncanny valley
The motion-captured performances are the best I’ve ever seen in a video game, conveying each wrinkle and nuance of each actor’s work without ever dipping into the uncanny valley—a particularly impressive feat when you’re dealing with faces and voices as recognizable as Norman Reedus and Mads Mikkelsen.
—Scott Meslow, GQ, 11 Nov. 2019
AI voices, which can convincingly mimic human voices, are “beyond uncanny valley,” said Richie Cartwright, the founder of … a weight loss startup that used one AI product to call pharmacies …
—Computer animation has never been better, but there’s still plenty of room for improvement. If we’re ever going to venture through to other side of the uncanny valley—[to] that place where viewers can’t discern between what’s simulated and what’s real—it’ll be because we’ve finally imbued our virtual characters with natural appearances and movement.
—An example of the Uncanny Valley (fig. 5) from the animation world was related to me by Henry Selick, the director of the stop-motion animated film James and the Giant Peach. He told of the development process of the James character, who had to be changed to be less realistic after a few days of shooting, because the test footage came back and gave audiences an eerie feeling that they were watching a dead child crawling around the set.
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Where does uncanny valley come from?
Uncanny valley is credited to Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori, whose 1970 article on the phenomenon, Bukimi no Tani, has been translated as “uncanny valley.”
In 1970, the Japanese robotics expert Masahiro Mori published his article “The Uncanny Valley,” in which he theorized that people’s feeling of “rapport” with machines increases as they become more lifelike—our affection toward toy robots rises as they better resemble and mimic life. At a point in this rising level of rapport that is tied to resemblance of the living, Mori asserts, there is a sudden and precipitous drop in the comfort level, as we find uncanny the very robots that pretend to be living beings so well. In other worse, the more lifelike a robot, the more at ease we feel with it, but when it reaches a certain level of being too lifelike, we suddenly find it creepy and horrifying. Then, as the robot reaches an even greater level of perfection in the mimicry of humanity, the rapport level goes back up, leaving behind what he calls the “uncanny valley,” as expressed in the graph …
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How is uncanny valley used?
While the term originated in the field of robotics, it has since expanded and is often encountered in discussions of the increasingly lifelike nature of computer animation, video games, and AI.
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