Perfection isn’t always a good thing to pursue. You can end up making children cry, as the producers of “Shrek” did when they screened the computer-animated movie for youngsters.
The early version of Princess Fiona looked too human, creeping kids out. The digitized actors in “Polar Express” and “Beowulf” also made some people feel uneasy, much in the way that robots and marionettes can be disturbing.
This sense of discomfort is called “uncanny valley,” a widely-felt but poorly-understood phenomenon that has been clearly measured for the first time by the University of California, San Diego.
Neuroscientist Ayse Saygin found an area of the brain that became more active when people watched videos of a robot that greatly resembles a human, but doesn’t move like one. It was an unconscious reaction; people thought, “Wait, that’s not quite right.”
The discovery is part of much broader, on-going brain research that could lead to advances in the fast-growing area of social robotics and animation. Scientists are trying to use robots and characters to do everything from teach courses, baby sit kids, and aid people recovering from a stroke. In Japan, the world leader in the field, scientists created a life-like dental patient to give dentists something to practice on. Everyone’s trying to strike a balance between the realistic, and the too real. Disney closed one of its production companies because the humanoid characters in “Mars Needs Moms” caused lots of uncanny valley in viewers.
“If you’re going to make robots that interact with people you should make ones that don’t freak them out,” says Saygin, who specializes in studying how the brain perceives movement. “And robots are going to be more of a part of our future.”
The term uncanny valley isn’t widely known to the general public, but it is a familiar feeling. People accept and even love robots and animated characters that sort of look like humans. The design of the characters in “Avatar” helped make the movie a hit. But at some point, such figures become too human -- too uncanny -- and our acceptance declines, or drops into a valley.
“Things become too weird or disturbing,” says Saygin. “But no one knows where the boundary is. Some people don’t even think that uncanny valley exists.”
Her research may help clarify matters. Saygin used functional magnetic resonance imaging to monitor what happened in the brains of 20 people when they were shown video of a real Japanese woman, an android named Repliee Q2 who greatly resembles the woman, and the android with much of its synthetic skin stripped away. The human, the android and the robot, as they’re called in a research paper, performed non-threatening motions, such as drinking water from a cup and wiping a table with a cloth.
The study excluded people who had worked with robots, or who had visited Japan, where robots are a greater part of the culture than they are in the United States. Repliee Q2, which was createdby Osaka University and Kokoro, Inc., is especially well-known in Japan.