Into the uncanny valley

It was only recently that I came to know about the Uncanny valley. The idea was put forward by the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970.

The concept implies that whereas cartoonish or other abstract human figures draw immediate empathy, robots or animations that appear similar to humans (but not identical) provoke a sense of unease.

So the familiarity we feel with robots and other facsimiles of humans increases with their human likeness, but there is a dip in the graph (Uncanny Valley), when the object is almost human but not quite. In Mori’s view, a full ascent out of the valley occurs only when robots become indistinguishable from humans. But the experimental results are not conclusive,

.. researchers have started to ask whether the uncanny valley actually exists. Mori’s graph was not based on experimental data—and recent studies mapping out responses to humanlike robots have produced conflicting results..

But cultural background might also influence the perception of the valley, as Christoph Bartneck has pointed out. I wonder if all this combined explains why I (a fan of Disney in general) never quite became a fan of Anime/Manga ;-).