My research on the Uncanny Valley (Unit 2)

November 23, 2017

My research on the Uncanny Valley (Unit 2)

The uncanny valley refers to a psychological theory effect involving art and robots and human emotions. For example, when a robot starts to look a lot more human-like, the audience start to feel it doesn't look right thus leading them to have bad feeling towards the object. Furthermore it gets more worse as the object's appearance is more human-like and the audience tend to change into a good emotion as the object gets close to look more human-like. Overall, the uncanny valley was theorised by a Japanese robotics professor Masahiro Mori in 1970.

So how does it affect animation? Animators use CGI thus they are unwilling to put it in a form of human-like. They do this because they don't want their presentation to affect the audience badly. Although this might a little over-cautious, there are a ton of evidences on ignoring the uncanny valley. An example of this links to the 2004 Christmas animated film - The Polar Express was portrayed widely on criticism due to the appearance on character animations, which was a used by 3D motion capture before digitally skinned. In conclusion, critics described this piece as 'lifeless', 'nightmarish' and even 'horrifying' leading to the problem of realism on which they slight lacked on, yet not fully convincing. This film plummets a mark on the graph of the uncanny valley.

Image result for uncanny valley animation

This screenshot of the character 'Hero Girl' portrayed in the film. However, it has been proven that the modelling is slightly undeveloped.

Another example of another film relating to the theory is 2009 science-fiction film called Avatar - a live a film which part of it uses photo-realistic camera technology due to the alien-cat hybrid characters portrayed in the film. According to the critics, the movie described the purpose of the it was the director - James Cameron to overcome the theory of the uncanny valley quoting "a complete ecosystem of phantasmagorical plants and creatures, and a native people with a rich culture and language. "

This screenshot shows the first two characters. I comparison to Polar Express, the modelling seems realistic making it look like make the costume and make up were actually used.