Uncanny Valley: Fundamentals and Applications

By Fouad Sabry

What Is Uncanny Valley

The term "uncanny valley" originates from the field of aesthetics and refers to a postulated relation between the degree to which a thing resembles a human being and the emotional response one has to the object. The idea indicates that humanoid artifacts that poorly resemble actual human people induce feelings of unease and aversion in spectators. These feelings might be uncanny or curiously familiar at the same time. The term "Valley" refers to a decrease in the human observer's affinity for the replica, which is often a relation that grows stronger as the replica becomes more human-like.

How You Will Benefit

(I) Insights, and validations about the following topics:

Chapter 1: Uncanny Valley

Chapter 2: Android (robot)

Chapter 3: Humanoid Robot

Chapter 4: Artificial Consciousness

Chapter 5: Social Robot

Chapter 6: David Hanson (robotics designer)

Chapter 7: Actroid

Chapter 8: Android Science

Chapter 9: Neurorobotics

Chapter 10: Artificial Empathy

(II) Answering the public top questions about uncanny valley.

(III) Real world examples for the usage of uncanny valley in many fields.

(IV) 17 appendices to explain, briefly, 266 emerging technologies in each industry to have 360-degree full understanding of uncanny valley' technologies.

Who This Book Is For

Professionals, undergraduate and graduate students, enthusiasts, hobbyists, and those who want to go beyond basic knowledge or information for any kind of uncanny valley.

• Language: English
• Publisher: One Billion Knowledgeable
• Release date: Jul 4, 2023

Book preview

Chapter 1: Uncanny valley

In aesthetics, the uncanny valley (Japanese: 不気味の谷 bukimi no tani) is a hypothesized relation between an object's degree of resemblance to a human being and the emotional response to the object.

The idea indicates that humanoid artifacts that poorly resemble genuine human beings induce emotions of anxiety and aversion in spectators. These sensations might be eerie or curiously familiar at the same time.

A decrease in the human observer's affection for the duplicate is denoted by the word Valley., a connection that, all things being equal, strengthens with the human resemblance of the duplicate.

Robotics, realistic dolls, and 3D computer animations are some examples of this kind of technology. The term valley has been used as a reaction to the growing prevalence of technologies such as virtual reality, augmented reality, and photorealistic computer animation. This is in response to the increasing verisimilitude of the creation, which is getting closer and closer to being indistinguishable from reality. According to the uncanny valley concept, a creature that looks nearly exactly like a human has a greater chance of causing viewers to experience unsettling emotions.

The concept was identified by the robotics professor Masahiro Mori as 'bukimi no tani genshō' (不気味の谷現象) in 1970.

According to Mori's original hypothesis, as the appearance of a robot is made more human, some observers' emotional response to the robot becomes increasingly positive and empathetic, up until it reaches a point beyond which the response quickly becomes strong revulsion. After that point, the response quickly becomes strong disgust. The emotional reaction, on the other hand, becomes positive once again when the robot's look continues to become less recognizable from that of a human person, and it approaches the degrees of empathy that are experienced between humans.

There have been a variety of hypotheses put forth in an effort to understand the cognitive process that lies behind the phenomena:

Automatic, stimulus-driven appraisals of uncanny stimuli elicit aversion by activating an evolved cognitive mechanism for the avoidance of selecting mates with low fertility, poor hormonal health, or ineffective immune systems based on visible features of the face and body that are predictive of those traits. Mate selection. Automatic, stimulus-driven appraisals of uncanny stimuli elicit aversion by activating an evolved cognitive mechanism for the avoidance of selecting mates with low fertility, poor hormonal health, or ineffective immune.

The experience of seeing a uncanny robot triggers an intrinsic dread of mortality as well as culturally endorsed defenses for dealing with the inevitability of death...

[P]artially deconstructed androids...play on people's irrational anxieties of being diminished, replacement, and annihilation: (1) A mechanism with a human façade and a mechanical interior plays on our subconscious fear that we are all just soulless machines.

(2) Androids with varying degrees of deformation and mutilation, decapitation, or disassembly are similar to the appearance of a battlefield after a war has ended and, as such, serve as a constant reminder of the fact that we will die.

(3) Given that the vast majority of androids are carbon duplicates of real persons, they are doppelgängers and may elicit a fear of being replaced, at the workplace, in a partnership or marriage, and the like.

(4) The jerkiness of an android's motions may be unnerving since it inspires a sense of losing control over one's own body.

Uncanny stimuli may trigger a cognitive process that initially developed to encourage the avoidance of probable sources of diseases by generating a disgust reaction. This was done so that organisms could protect themselves from the spread of disease. Because (1) defects are an indication of disease, (2) more human-looking organisms are genetically closer related to human beings, and (3) the probability of contracting disease-causing bacteria, viruses, and other parasites increases with genetic similarity, the more human an organism looks, the stronger the aversion to its defects.

Sorites paradoxes: Stimuli with human and nonhuman traits undermine our sense of human identity by linking qualitatively different categories, human and nonhuman, by a quantitative metric, degree of human likeness. This links qualitatively different categories, human and nonhuman, in a way that undermines our sense of who we are as humans.

Violation of human norms: Even if something appears to be sufficiently nonhuman, its human characteristics can still be recognized, which can lead to the development of empathy. However, if the thing has humanoid characteristics, it triggers our mental image of a human other and the normative expectations that come along with it. A human observer is likely to experience a sense of uneasiness due to the obvious presence of nonhuman characteristics. A robot that has entered the uncanny valley is judged not by the standards of a robot that does a passable job of pretending to be human, but rather by the standards of a human that does a terrible job of acting like a normal person. To put it another way, a robot that has entered the uncanny valley is judged not by the standards of a robot that does a passable job of pretending to be human, but rather by the standards of a human that This has been connected to the concept of perceptual uncertainty as well as the predictive coding theory.

The idea of human identity is seen as being in jeopardy by some people due to the presence of artificial beings that have human-like characteristics. The religious conception of human identity. An illustration of this may be found in the conceptual framework that was developed by psychiatrist Irvin Yalom. Yalom suggests that people build psychological shields in order to escape the existential anguish that comes from thinking about their own mortality. One of these defenses is known as specialness, which refers to the irrational belief that the central premises of life, such as aging and death, apply to everyone else but oneself.

Inconsistent perceptual signals are what cause the unpleasant affect that is linked to eerie stimuli. This effect is brought