Welcome to the Valley

Have you seen Shrek? Don’t you just love that big oaf? Sure, he’s unpleasant and gross, but there’s sort of a sweet charm about him, isn’t there? Why you feel like you could just give a big hug.
What about the Polar Express, have you seen that? Isn’t there something off about those kids? Their faces seem cold and unpleasant. They have dead eyes and don’t seem to move right. It’s a pretty unpleasant feeling to watch them.
But what’s the difference? Why do we respond so well to an artificial ogre, while grimace at somewhat realistic looking kids? The answer can be found in the depths of the uncanny valley.
The theory was first proposed in 1970 by a Japanese scientist named Masahiro Mori. Mori was a roboticist, who took note of how artificial simulations of life begin as being cute, until they start to near a level of realism, at which point, the emphatic reaction to them becomes negative. In terms of things that are attempting to look human, the point at which they are between “barely human” and “fully human” is said to be the uncanny valley.
Something about the area in between is unsettling. Movements don’t look right, faces don’t seem expressive enough, and the whole package seems to have something out of place.
In this blog, I want to explore the depths of the uncanny valley in respect to both robots and digital creations to see when we’ve fallen into it, how we’ve gotten around, and how close we are to climbing out altogether.