uncanny valley

uncanny valley

A hypothesized phenomenon holding that humans experience a sense of revulsion or cognitive discomfort when encountering robots, dolls, animations, or other human-like entities that exhibit human characteristics that are not precisely lifelike. The "valley" refers to the portion of the spectrum of realism in which a feeling of the "uncanny" is experienced—i.e. between depictions that are convincingly lifelike and those that are intentionally unrealistic. The concept was first described by Japanese robotics professor Masahiro Mori in 1970. None of our testers reacted positively to that doll. They all found it creepy, which might be indicative of the uncanny valley. The computer-generated faces at the end of the movie really dipped into the uncanny valley—I found them really distracting.
See also: valley
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.
See also:
  • valley
  • hate the sight of (someone or something)
  • hate, be sick of, etc. the sight of somebody/something
  • be sick of the sight of (someone or something)
  • can't stand the sight of (someone or something)
  • make (one's) blood curdle
  • make your blood curdle
  • sink into depression
  • depression
  • fall into depression
References in periodicals archive
In chapters 3, 4, and 5, Chu follows up on other sites of the uncanny, including war trauma, robots (and what Masahiro Mori calls the "uncanny valley"), and the pent-up frustration and rage glossed as "han" in Korean, all of which are dependent on lyrical flights to "literalize" their fantastic topographies.
This short essay was first published in The Chinati Foundation Newsletter #15, in October 2010, and appears in Uncanny Valley under the section titled "Four Easy Pieces."
If yes, then you've probably been a visitor to what's called the "uncanny valley".
The uncanny valley, a phrase coined by a Japanese researcher nearly three decades ago, describes that disquieting feeling that occurs when viewers look at representations designed to be as human-like as possible - whether computer animations or androids - but somehow fall short.
The concern that people would be duped by Google's new feature underscores the urgency for society to determine what kind of relationship it wants with its artificial aids as technology companies get closer to traversing the so-called uncanny valley. That's a term used to describe the gulf between a robot or software that has just enough imperfections to raise skepticism and another that's indistinguishable from a human.
uncanny valley: a psychological concept that describes the feelings of unease or revulsion that people tend to have toward artificial representations of human beings, as robots or computer animations, that closely imitate many but not all the features and behaviors of actual human beings.
Virtual reality technologists have long warned of the dangers of the "uncanny valley" -- a theory that, the more perfectly an image resembles a real being, the more the audience will notice the imperfections.
The result is disturbing, at times evoking the uncanny valley, and a biting satire of modern Chinese society.
The industry term "uncanny valley" describes the disturbing effect of an animation that looks all too human but nevertheless lacks life--like a mobile corpse.
No one has figured out how to bridge what computer scientists term the "uncanny valley" - the wide gap we sense between ourselves and imitations of ourselves.
But as games become more self-consciously cinematic, and as CGI inches ever closer to the uncanny valley, their so-called "ludonarrative dissonance" is only going to become all the more glaring in turn.
"Uncanny Valley" is a collection of poems from experienced poet Jon Woodward as he presents a collection of poetry that delves into our culture and its mythology and brings out things we never questioned.
Far from attempting to perfectly replicate life - which can sometimes result in mannequin-esque limbs that drag the wearer several levels down into the Uncanny Valley - many cutting-edge prosthetics are redesigning legs and arms from the ground up.
The minute you start hitting photorealism, you hit the uncanny valley when you push the performances beyond what the real animal could do.
Other films took the image of horrific corpses in different directions: dummies, puppets, mummies, waxworks--figures inhabiting the uncanny valley between human beings and fantastic shapes.