Uncanny Valley
The
uncanny valley is a hypothesis that when
robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost, but not entirely, like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The "valley" in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot's lifelikeness. It was introduced by
Japanese roboticist
Masahiro Mori in
1970, and has been linked to
Ernst Jentsch's concept of "
the uncanny" identified in a
1906 essay, "On the Psychology of the Uncanny." Jentsch's conception is famously elaborated upon by
Sigmund Freud in a
1919 essay, simply entitled "The Uncanny" ("
Das Unheimliche"). A similar problem exists in realistic
3D computer animation, such as with the film
The Polar Express.
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