Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
easy to sense a catch or when a figure is pretending to be real, it must be ideally
crafted to look natural. Any minor mistake would be easily noticed by viewers.
Moreover, the brain apparently does not particularly say that, for example, the arms
aretooshortforafigureofaspecificheightorthemouthistoobig.Itsimplytransfers
a generalized signal that something is wrong. In addition, by looking at somebody's
image, we try to read their emotions by using empathy that helps us to determine
the emotional state of another human and predict the possible intentions. Now, ima-
gine a situation: there is a character, which is pretty realistic by basic attributes, but
subconsciously, we feel that something is wrong, not knowing the actual reason. The
effect is stronger if the character is moving and his motility is not perfectly realistic.
The empathy system experiences some troubles. As a result, we sense that in front
of us is a strange person whose image and behavior is a little bizarre, so it is better
to be on the alert. Such a sensation confuses us and the emotions received are not
pleasant and comfortable, although they are not very strong and long termed. They
mostly consist of distaste, rather than fear.
This effect is known as the
uncanny valley
hypothesis. The name is taken from a
description of a graph, showing a relationship between human likeness of various
humanoid images and the emotional reaction of the audience to their look. Normally,
the emotional response ispositive andit increases with the degree of visual likeness.
The values are proportional, and suddenly when the likeness is high enough (around
70 percent), but not yet equal to 100 percent, the response abruptly falls down, form-
ing a valley on the graph. There are negative reactions gathered in the valley, which
is why it was called uncanny. The audience will only change its mind and begin to
have positive feelings when the degree of human likeness approaches somewhere
close to 100 percent. The theory was developed by Japanese roboticist
Masahiro
Mori
in 1970. He researched the emotional impact of humanoid robots on people.
There are several theories about the origin of the uncanny valley. For example, some
opine that it is caused by an ancient alarm system that keeps us away from bizarre
strangers, giving us a cue that they were hiding something. Their peculiar look could
mean that they had some form of dangerous diseases, and unusual behavior may
