Summary:
In video gaming and robotics, the paradoxical point at which a simulation of life becomes so good it's bad. A term coined by the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori.
Notes:
- Mori observed that the more humanlike his robots became, the more people were attracted to them, but only up to a point:
- if an android become too realistic and lifelike, suddenly people were repelled and disgusted.
- The problem is in the nature of how we identify with robots
- When an android, such as R2-D2 or C-3PO, barely looks human, we cut it a lot of slack.
- It seems cute.
- We don't care that it's only 50 percent humanlike.
- But when a robot becomes 99 percent lifelike—so close that it's almost real—we focus on the missing 1 percent.
- We notice the slightly slack skin, the absence of a truly human glitter in the eyes.
- The once-cute robot now looks like an animated corpse.
- Our warm feelings, which had been rising the more vivid the robot became, abruptly plunge downward.
- Mori called this plunge "the Uncanny Valley."
- As video games have developed increasingly realistic graphics, they have begun to suffer more and more from this same conundrum.
- Games have unexpectedly fallen into the Uncanny Valley.
