Ode To The Uncanny Valley
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Thursday, 8 of April , 2010 at 1:59 am
IEEE put together this cool slideshow with a bunch of different exemplifications of the Uncanny Valley… Artificial creations that are creepily not quite human:
Now, there are some things in that slideshow that I might not have included… Like ASIMO, for example. I’ve talked about this before, but I feel like not having a face keeps ASIMO from trying to look human, and therefore out of the Uncanny Valley. Same thing with RIBA: a smiling bear is just not that uncanny. I don’t think that there’s anything inherently creepy about robots acting like humans, things just get weird when they try to look human.
On the other side of things, I think Emily manages to pull it off: She’s software, not hardware, but I admit, I was fooled. See the video here. We’re still a long way off from being able to do that with hardware, and arguably, it might not even be a good idea to try. In any case, the Uncanny Valley is going to be around for a good long while, and we’ll keep having fun cringing at the robots that end up at the bottom of it.
[ IEEE ]
Thanks Randi!
Comments (2)
Category: Uncanny Valley
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Comment by Michael
Made Thursday, 8 of April , 2010 at 7:28 pm
Interesting to see the range of … uncanniness. A very few of the human-looking ones were actually not that bad…
Comment by new mover mailing list
Made Tuesday, 22 of November , 2011 at 1:45 am
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