Into the Uncanny Valley

From bad CGI characters to creepy humanoid robots, everyone knows the uncanny valley effect when they see it. But where did this idea come from and to what extent is it actually a thing? Join Robert and Joe as they descend into the uncanny valley and explore just what's going on in our minds when we lock eyes with less-than-human simulacrums.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick and Robert.
I want to take you back to a conversation we had.
I think it was last December. He was right after

(00:23):
I went to see the new, the most recent Star
Wars movie, Rogue one. Oh yes, uh, And I am
on the cusp, the very cusp of seeing it myself
and waiting for it to become rent rental options. So,
oh it's not yet. No, still got still a week
or two out. So has everything been spoiled for you
so far? No? People have been a little um cooler

(00:43):
on this one. Um. I think some things are probably
spoiled for me, but not like that last one where
everybody just really felt the need to, you know, just
lay it all out on social media. Let me let
me spoil one thing for you here and they go
to space and there's a war there, ye, stars among
the stars. But there is one thing in the movie. Okay,
so mild spoiler for Rogue one coming out. It's something

(01:04):
that probably everybody already knows. It's also not really about
the content of the movie, but just about which characters
you see. But if you are ready, are you ready
for the smild spoiler? Okay, we get to see if
you remember back to the original Star Wars back go
back to the seventies, Peter Cushing as Grand mof Tarkin,
the guy who was in fact Darth Vader's boss on

(01:24):
the Star Him. Yeah, he's enough of this, Vada release him.
And we love Peter Cushing because he was in all
these old monster movies. He he goes back to the
Hammer movies. He was. He was Dr Frankenstein, like the
villainous Dr Frankenstein of the Hammer films, and he I
think was the hero of the version of the Mummy
that has Christopher Lee as as the Mummy. Uh, the one.

(01:46):
I've got the poster for it in the house, except
it's the Belgian posters, so it's La Malediction de Feron.
But yeah, so Peter Cushing was the original Grand mof Tarkin,
this bad Empire guy who was Darth Vader's ball us.
And the thing they do in the New Rogue One
is they bring him back. He's dead, he has passed away.

(02:07):
This movie takes place a little bit before the original
Star Wars is supposed to have taken place, but they
bring this character back and they have an actor stand
in as him, but it's not just a recast role.
They try to make it look as if this is
Peter Cushing standing here delivering the lines with c g I.
And this is an odd choice because, all right, so

(02:29):
you're gonna have Darth Vader in there, that's easy to do.
Darth Vader is a dude in a suit, voiced by
James Earl Jones. James Earl Jones is still alive, so
you can check that one off the list. But Grandma Tarkin,
like you said, uh that the actor is dead. So
it seems to me like the first easiest thing to
do is just don't have those scenes. If you know
it's gonna be problematic, don't even mess with it, or um,

(02:51):
just use an actual living actor such as Wayne pie
Graham who played him in Revenge of the Sith. Or
go with Ben Cross, who's another actor that I've seen
over the years brought up as potential Tarkan casting, or
head go with Ralph Finds, Like, clearly you have the
money to throw down the well of expensive c g
I equipment. Just go ahead and hire Ralph Finds. I

(03:11):
know he's pricy, but he's great and the consummate evil Brett. Yeah,
he even kind of looks like a younger Peter Cushing.
He's got that same kind of angular face, like the
thin long face with the jaw and the scowl. It's
all there. And it's not like fans of various franchise
are not clearly cool with recasting. It's not like we're
gonna be thrown into, you know, a traumatic spin, because

(03:34):
you can look to a Game of Thrones, James Bond, Twilight,
Harry Potter, etcetera, like we we get it. We can
roll with a recast. Now. I want to go into
completely different directions thinking about this c g I grandmof Tarken.
One is that I didn't like it in the movie. Okay,
I saw it and I was just like, don't want this.

(03:55):
It pulled me out of the movie. It made me
stop being in the story and just thinking about how
did they do that? I don't On one hand, it
looked great, Like when you see the movie, I think
you will kind of have to agree. It's unless I'm
missing something. It's the best c g I simulation of
a real person that I've ever seen, Like, it looks amazing,

(04:18):
but it still looks not quite good enough that I
can just accept it and go with it. I kept
continually thinking, like, what am I looking at? It's almost
really him, but it's not quite really him, and it
made me feel icky. So in this it made you
descend into what we've come to know as a as
a as a species as the Uncanny Valley. Right, So

(04:41):
today is going to be the first of two episodes
we want to do about the Uncanny Valley, And this
first one we wanted descend into the Uncanny Valley, but
not just talk about it in terms of the standard
pop culture phenomenon, because this is one of those side
tech concepts that is totally filtered down into the mainstream.
Everybody talks about the Uncanny Valley. It's a totally norm mole,
ground level pop culture phenomenon now, especially with as much

(05:04):
bad C g I as we encounter in the movie.
But there it's also a scientific field of study. It's
something that people are looking into with empirical research to
try to figure out does it really exist, If it
does really exist, what causes it, what can be done
about it? So we want to look at it from
both of these angles today, right, So we should probably
roll through some just fun examples of this. We're gonna

(05:25):
try and not to go too long on this. If
we do, we'll cut it and save it for trailer talk.
Either way, we'll probably do a Facebook live trailer talk
on an upcoming Friday about some of these movies. Okay,
So I want to go back to a much earlier
experience for me, Robert, did you see The Mummy Returns
in two thousand one? Remember this one? I don't think
I saw The Mummy Returns. I saw the Money and

(05:47):
I remember digging it at the time, but not not
the old hammer one or the Universal one. No, no,
the yeah, the the the re the reboot of the Money.
Is his name, Brendan Frasier. Yeah, and what Arnold Voslo?
Yeah he was he. I I enjoyed him as they
kind of brought in some of these aspects of the
tragic Mummy figure, which I liked. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.

(06:07):
But in two thousand one we got the Scorpion King.
This is a character that appears in the Mummy Returns
and he's pretty much if you want to picture it,
if you haven't seen the movie. Actually you should look
up video of this. We're gonna tell you to go
look up images and video quite a few times in
these episodes because some visual aids will help. But if
you want to picture it, picture the concept of a centaur,
except replace the horse parts with scorpion parts and some

(06:31):
other random arthropod bits, and the man part on top
is Dwayne the Rock Johnson. Except it's not Dwayne the
Rock Johnson. There's a there's a bit of a problem
with the rocks. So the corpion Corpion, the Scorpion King
scuttles into action in the film, and you can tell
immediately something is wrong because it's not just the rock.

(06:52):
It's this c g I upper body designed to look
like the rock. It's supposed to be him, but it
doesn't look right. It looks like somebody took the rock,
skinned him, and then took the skin suit and then
boiled it and then maybe ironed it and rubbed it
down with wax, and then stretched it over somebody else,
like a bald Crispin Glover wearing a waxed up the

(07:16):
rock suit. And and that would be fine if that's
what they were going for. But I guess the disconnect
here is that clearly they wanted this to be like
the Rock as a scorpion center and not this um,
creepy in human above the nation that you've described, right,
And it's sort of I guess works because it's okay
if he's creepy, because he's a monster. But he was

(07:37):
creepy in a way that he clearly wasn't supposed to be.
It wasn't just that, oh he's a monster. He looks weird.
Something looked wrong with him. And this was at a
time when computer generated animations were hot, right two thousand one.
They seemed to be getting better all the time, and
yet they were terrible, producing these characters that were not
only not convincingly human, they were literally physically unpleasant to

(07:59):
look at. They were repulsive. Yeah, it was a period
when everyone was just foolishly optimistic about what we could
achieve with c g I, and you know, into in
a sense, maybe that hasn't gone away. We're still very
the Rogue one example, Like, clearly everyone is very optimistic
about how great this looked, and even though to your point,
it does look great, but within the context of the film,

(08:21):
something doesn't quite work. Yeah, I would say, Now for
some people, we can get into this more. I think,
especially in the next episode when we then the next one,
we want to try to go beyond the valley, the
Uncanny Valley. But I will say at this point, for
some people, Tarkan was not over the line or under
the line. I don't know where you put the line.
But for for some people it worked, and I do

(08:44):
think that's an interesting thing to acknowledge that while for
me I experienced this, uh, not to the same extent
as the Scorpion King, but a kind of Scorpion King revulsion,
not everybody did. Now, one thing about Tarkan is that
the Tarkan c Jack character is correct me if I'm wrong,
because I have not seen it myself yet. But he
is interacting with human actors in this in his scenes, yeah,

(09:07):
I think so, or at least he's in a film
with other human actors, even if he's not sharing the
exact same scene with them. So you might think, well,
if you just had a movie just full of brilliant
looking Tarkans, maybe it would be okay. And maybe it would.
But some of the classic examples of Uncanny Valley happened
to be films that are filled with nothing but c

(09:28):
g I characters. Yeah, how about one from the same
year as The mom of Your Turns two thousand one,
If you go back to Oh Yes, Final Fantasy, The
Spirits Within, I remember kind of liking it. I do too.
It was a film that I think I kind of
half watched, half worked on, like some just college coursework

(09:48):
or something just on in the background. And and maybe
that was the right level of immersion in it. But
I remember digging it. But at the same time, there
are a lot of dead puppet eyes in this movie.
Oh yeah, and it's so I saw it at the time.
I remember having mixed feelings about the animation, like in
some senses, I remember thinking, Wow, that looks so cool.
That again may have been a product of its time.

(10:09):
We can talk about that more, how our expectations change
as things go on. But also I don't know. There
were multiple things wrong with that movie, one of which
being that the last line of spoken dialogue in the movie,
as a friend of mine pointed out at the time,
was oh it's warm. Well I could I don't remember

(10:29):
the line, so I can't speak to it how well
it landed, But I can see that being a problem credits. Now,
another big one, this came out just three years later, is,
of course, The Polar Express. Now, when people talk about
the Uncanny Valley these days, I'd say this is a
top three mentioned. Yeah, this is one of the defining
nightmares of our time now based on a wonderful children's

(10:51):
book about the magic of Christmas time. Yeah, the book
is wonderful, but it's certainly one of these examples. If
you take a very brief children's book and you try
and adapt it into a a feature length motion picture,
that's very difficult to do. In fact, I'm really grasping
for an example where anybody actually pulled it off. Like,
the best adaptations of children's books that come to mind

(11:11):
are all very short, uh, very short films generally. I'm
thinking of Dr Seus's adaptations from the seventies and eighties,
not The Polar Express, which is just an exercise in
psychic trauma brought on by just seemingly intentionally weaponized Uncanny Valley. Um,
you know, the soulless puppet people. I've never seen this movie,

(11:35):
but I looked up clips to see what people were
talking about, and oh man, they they are not kidding it.
I don't know how children made it through this movie.
It has these it has these creepy elves, It's got
a creepy Tom Hanks as a train conductor. Nothing seems right,
Everything seems like it's just about to everybody's about to

(11:56):
start melting and screaming. Yeah. I think this is one
where it was a poor idea in my opinion, and
uh in the technology was not there to to rescue
the idea. Now the next one we're going to discuss though.
I think it was a great idea on paper, but
it just didn't work out on the screen. And that's
of course two thousand sevens Baywolf. Now as this Robert

(12:18):
Zemeckis who did this, Yeah, Robert Zemeckis helmed it. And
then the writing it was Neil Gaiman and Roger Avery.
So some you know, some some some big names just
attached and to the the ideas behind this, uh this movie,
and of course based on the story of Grindel and Beowulf,
which is a classic you would think, you know, hard
to miss action narrative. I think the Beowolf could make

(12:41):
a really great movie if somebody did it right. Yeah,
I think so too. I have yet to see that movie.
But but but certainly has all the the potential in
the world. And they had a pretty cool vocal cast
as well, I think. And Angelina Jolie is in it
as the monster's mother. They have ray Winstone as Bayolwolf. Yeah,
he does the voice of Beowulf, and uh, and who

(13:02):
was it that plays the monster? We were just crisp
now I've seen it all back home. Not one of
my favorite monster depictions of Grenville, by the way, But
he's a monster. We can get past that. But everybody
else in the film really has the uncanny valley that
going on to to a high degree. I think I
read a quote somewhere where film critic was talking about

(13:24):
how the monsters in the movie were only slightly less
frightening than the humans. Yeah, yeah, the humans. It just
it just didn't land. Now at this point you're probably thinking, well,
how about video games, because they're certainly when you're thinking
about computer animated human beings interacting with each other, staring
right into the camera, you think of video games. Yeah,

(13:46):
And and I think, and you know, here's here's the
thing here. I have to say that I haven't noticed
it as often these days I think a lot of
game animators have found ways to get around the uncanny Valley. Yeah.
I don't want to get to ahead of our flow here,
but I think one thing that I've noticed they sometimes
do is that they don't actually go for photo realism,

(14:06):
and they go for a kind of more real than
real combination of like a comic book style type character illustration,
and then these other realistic aspects that when when you
look at a video game character, you would never mistake
it for a photograph of a person, even even one
that's got really good graphics. But much like the way

(14:27):
dialogue is written in films, you know, you don't want
to make dialogue sound like real people talk, because that
would be horrible to listen to, but you do want
to make it sound quote realistic. You don't want to
make your characters look too realistic in animation, but you
do want to make them look quote realistic. In other words,
they feel real. Yeah, this reminds me of a game

(14:50):
franchise that I haven't I don't think I've ever played
more than a demo of this, but the Gears of
War series. So all the people in this kind of
look like like if you're gonna be critical, but you
might say everyone looks kind of like they're weird guerrilla people.
Like it was a like we're in an alternate world
where unrealistically huge upper bodies. Yeah, as if evolution took
a slightly different turn into an intelligent primates. Uh. And

(15:13):
yet they look real. They don't look like they don't
get an uncanny effect rolling off them, Like you know,
you look at them, you can see pores, you can
see hair follicills. They look real, but they are but
that they are certainly not going for authentic human being
there all right, Now, I want to put out one
more example here before we move on, and it's a

(15:34):
rare example of uncanny valley avoidance, a very specific type
of uncanny valley avoidance, and that is au from a
fantastic stop motion short that was produced by the National
Film Board of Canada. And you can find this online
if you just do a search for it. It's Madam
Tutley Putly and it's a wonderful little little film, very

(15:54):
very French feel to it. Characters on a train, weirds,
frightening things occurring. Uh, definitely check it out. But the
trick to it there, these are stop motion animated characters,
and their eyes just feel so alive. They stare right
into you, and you don't you don't question for a
second that these are that these are people. And the

(16:16):
trick that they employed is that they used real human eyes,
not in a you know, depraved, evil puppet master kind
of way, either. They videotape the eyes of human actors
and then blended the footage with that of the puppets.
That sounds like an incredible gambit, because that sounds like
that could have produced some of the worst Uncanny Valley
feelings ever if it went wrong. Yeah, and and I

(16:37):
don't know, there may be some people who watch this
short and and have the opposite effect and and think
that it's super creepy. I found it to be like this,
this interesting example of circumventing the Uncanny Valley. But I'll
leave it for you guys to decide. I'll include a
link to this one as well as some of the
other sources we're talking about on the landing page for
this episode. It's stuff to blow your mind dot com.
All right, Well, we are going to take a quick

(16:58):
break and when we come back will get into the
origin of the scientific idea of the Uncanny Valley and
its history and research. All right, we're back. So the
Uncanny Valley. Where does this even come from? Right? So
we've already been talking about it because most people have
heard of this, they're somewhat familiar with it. I was

(17:19):
talking to Rachel about it though. She was saying, you know,
at least to her, it had this connotation of just
generally synthetically generated images being creepy in one way or another.
So maybe we should get into the specifics of the
origin of the idea. So let's go back to the
year nineteen seventy. Everything's great, Wait is it? I don't know,

(17:43):
but but everybody, everybody's looking forward to the future in
terms of creating humanoid robots. What are we going to
be able to do well? The Japanese roboticist massa Hiro
Mori of the Tokyo Institute of Technology. He wrote a
paper that was published in this Japanese journal Energy that
coined the term uncanny Valley to describe a problem that

(18:05):
he was predicting with increasingly humanoid robots. And this was
based on just some observations he'd had of of different events.
So you might say incidents in the progress of designing
humanoid robots, such as consumer electronics shows in Japan and
stuff like that. So what he predicted was that as
you had a humanoid robot, robot that looks like a

(18:28):
human and its likeness to a human increased, our attitude
towards them would improve. Our affinity would go up as
they became more human, until they reached a certain tipping
point of similarity to humans, where suddenly our affinity, our
friendly attitude, almost immediately shifts and plunges down into strong revulsion.

(18:51):
Being human is likable, being sort of human is likable,
but being almost human is horrible and repulsive. And then
of course at the final end, uh you you would
have a real human. So you can think of the
uncanny valley as a phase in a graph, an X
Y graph, and along the horizontal axis on the bottom,
you've got the degree of similarity to a human, and

(19:14):
then on the vertical axis you've got the degree of
our affinity for the object. And more hypothesized, this graph
would have these two peaks. You'd start with zero on
both axes, because a thing that has no human like
traits basically gets no human affinity response one way or another.
And we just don't you know, how much do you
really like an industrial conveyor belt. You're just sort of

(19:35):
neutral on it. But as you increase the humanity, you
give a robot arms or something that looks like a face, eyes, limbs,
you climb this gentle, gradual slope to the first peak
and affinity. Um, you know, and he didn't name the peak,
but I think we should name the peak. I think
this first peak should be called something like the cuteness peak.

(19:58):
That's not exactly right because it's not exactly cuteness, but
it's recognizing something kind of human about what you're looking at. Yeah, Like,
I mean, we don't have to describe cute to everyone here,
but certainly this is hello kitty territory, this is the
this is the domain of large eyed It's vaguely infant
or kitten like creatures that would never be mistaken for

(20:19):
human or real, but they resonate with us for a
number of reasons. We could do a whole podcast infect
we have an old podcast episode about the science of cute.
Why that connects with us? Yeah, so they would include
that would include all kinds of robots that just kind
of have general, very basic faces that don't try to
have human skin or anything like that. That just might

(20:40):
have like kind of a mouth and some cartoonish eyes. Yeah, sure,
there you go. That the c three po boldly on
the cuteness. But at a certain point after this first speak,
this graph drops off steeply. So you keep going along
the x axis, but then the y axis drops off,
not just down to zero, but far below zero, into

(21:01):
the negative affinity range. And this part of the graph
is the uncanny valley. As the similarity to a real
human continues to increase near a dent. In other words,
as it becomes indistinguishable from a real human, our affinity
sharply shoots back up the second peak toward reality. So
I'd call this second peak the reality peak. It's when

(21:23):
you become, for all intents and purposes, a real human being. Yeah.
I would also say that if if robots were candy,
the bottom of the uncanny valley would be banana flavored
candy like that for me has always been a flavor
where it's like clearly like not only like runts that
have the bananas. I think, so like like great candy,

(21:44):
like grape candy doesn't really taste like grapes, but it's
it's far enough from the Uncanny Valley of candy that
you're you're okay, whoa, You're right, banana candy actually does
taste like bananas in a way that makes it not
really good. Yeah, Like I've candy fans, I don't eat
that much candy anymore. So maybe the technology has advanced,

(22:04):
but uh, my memory of the banana candy is is
that of an uncanny experience. Now, one thing we should
note is that so this original paper was published in
nineteen seventy twelve. English translation was published in uh the
I Triple A Robotics and Automation magazine. And that's what
I was using is my reference, that English translation from

(22:26):
uh and so it has some graphs here. It has
Morey's original graphs or interpretations of them, and we can
get into a little more detail on the nuances of
Morey's theory. But one thing I did read was that
many years later, somebody contacted more and he and they
were talking to him about this idea he had of
the uncanny Valley, and they were like, well, does does

(22:47):
anything lie beyond the peak of reality? And he said, hey,
oh yeah, actually there is such a thing. And he
said you know, beyond the real human, you'd have sort
of like artistic ideals, like the realm of forms even right. Yeah,
So well, I think he used an example of like
a statue of Buddha, you know, a beautiful, perfect statue

(23:08):
of Buddha. It's almost like it we have greater affinity
for it than we have for a realistic human because
we've been, well, to a large point, we've been conditioned
to right. Yeah, that that kind of gets into this,
this idea of conditioned familiarity that we not only have
with my religious icons, but also with pop culture icons,
so not only the Buddha, but also Robbie the robot,

(23:31):
or or even the Terminator or well, yeah, that does
make me think that in some ways, if if aesthetic
ideals and things that were familiar with through our culture
might be even beyond humans. I mean, again, this is
not like rigorous research, This is just what more he says,
he thinks, who predicts, Uh, could could there be like
a robot that we really love that's actually better than

(23:54):
a than a normal human? Well, you know, there's a
study that came out last year, I believe from Penn
State University that was kind of interesting alone. These lines.
So the researchers survey three seventy nine adults ages ages
sixty to eighty six, and they asked them for specific
memories of robot films they'd seen in their general attitudes
towards robots and and the you know, with the age here,

(24:16):
as you might imagine, they're really looking at at potential
care robots, like the idea of like what kind of
robots should help you use the bathroom? Do you want
something that looks like kind of like a person, or
do you want something that looks like a forklift with
a forklift mated with an easy chair. But if you
look at the ages used here and twenty sixteen, when
the study took place, you can say that these people

(24:38):
grew up with science fiction. Oh yeah, I mean they
might not have personally consumed a lot of it, but
it's in the culture, right, Yeah. They they definitely had
access to it. And the researchers found that individuals who
could recall more cinematic robot portrayals were increasingly likely to
hold positive attitudes towards robots in general. So it didn't
matter if they remembered murderous killbots or well meaning hell probots. Uh,

(25:01):
they need the mere memory of multiple robotic portrayals correlated
to pro robot vibes, so to study findings. They also
backed up the importance of human looking human asque robots
to invoke a sympathetic user response. But the researcher stress
that robot designers might want to incorporate robotic features that

(25:21):
older adults will remember from their cinematic past. So it's
saying that, like, don't just try to make it like
a human. Try to make it like the robots we
have known and loved. Yeah, like make it fun. You know,
if I'm if I need a robot to help me
go to the bathroom, may make it. Make make them
the robots from Silent Running, you know, Huie, Dowie and
Louie a little little guys. Then at least I can

(25:43):
engage my nostalgia a little bit totally. So I want
to look at a few more nuances from Maury's original
paper in nineteen seventy. So one thing I do think
it's very interesting and I want to come back to
as we explore this topic more. More hypothesizes in the
original paper that our perception of an un handy valley
might depend on the context in which we're we're viewing

(26:04):
the being. And the example he gives here is he's
talking about buon Rocko puppets, and so he says, quote,
I don't think that on close inspection of bun Rocku
puppet appears similar to a human being. But when we
enjoy a puppet show in the theater, were seated at
a certain distance from the stage, the puppets absolute size

(26:24):
is ignored. Its total appearance, including hand and eye movements,
is close to that of a human being. So, given
our tendency as an audience to become absorbed in this
form of art, we might feel a high level of
affinity for the puppet. I think that's interesting. So it's
it's not just the object, but it's also the context
in which we experience the object. You might have very

(26:46):
different feelings about a bun Rocku puppet lying on the
floor versus one that you go to see in the
context of staging a play. Yeah. I think that the
puppet argument is something to keep in mind throughout considerations
of the Uncanny Valley because there are a lot of
people that there are a lot of people who have
kind of um an irrational version to puppets in general,

(27:06):
and certainly if you take just a still puppet and
you hold it up, there are various puppets that one
might find a little bit uncanny or creepy, etcetera. But
in the process of performing with a talented performer is
going to bring that to life. Like that's the art form.
And and there's so many different varieties of puppetry. Certainly
they're they're too broad categories are it's situations where the

(27:30):
puppeteer is visible and puppet situation where puppeteer is not.
You know, so you have your basic the Muppets situation
where you don't see the puppeteers, but there are plenty
of art forms of puppetry performance styles in which the
puppeteer is very visible, either completely or just their face.
You see their eyes, you see that there's a person
involved here, and uh, and there's not this this mystery

(27:52):
or this sense of deception, right, yeah, I think conceptual
clues like that are very important. Also is when you
consider the the the idea of going to a puppet theater,
it also includes a certain attitude charging effect in the audience,
Like an an audience member goes to a puppet theater
prepared to suspend their disbelief, like you know what I mean,

(28:14):
Like you put yourself in an intentional state of open
mindedness about what you're viewing, and you give yourself an
interpretive framework through which to Like if you were not
prepared to watch a puppet theater story and suddenly a
puppet was just moving around, that might be a lot creepier.
So part of the Uncanny Valley effect is probably also

(28:36):
in the viewer themselves and in the so the context
is not just where you are, what's going on with
what you're looking at, but what you're expecting to see. Now.
One more thing that Morey points out is he thinks
that they're going to be very different rules governing the
Uncanny Valley for still objects versus moving objects. And essentially

(28:57):
his hypothesis is that movement is going to amplify both
the peaks and the valleys of the graph. So if
you imagine the graph we said earlier, gentle slope up
to first peak, you know, kind of cute whatever has
some human characteristics, then a dip down into too close
to human but not there, and then a final rise
up to actually human. He he would say if it's moving,

(29:20):
the peaks are going to be higher and the valleys
are going to be lower. Okay, so a thing that
is moving gets greater affinity if it's good if it's
at one of these two peaks, but it's even more
revolting and unpleasant if it's at the valley. Uh So
this this makes me think of Samara in The Ring,
those scenes where Samara is emerging from the TV or

(29:41):
the well, her movement is is jerky and and I
understand that they created that effect by having the actor
or actress walk backwards and then reversing the footage. So
you have this, you have this this movement that is
you know, natural, but being reversed it it feels very
unnatural and and it's hard to really pinpoint what's not

(30:02):
working for you about it. Right. So More in the
end concludes he gives this recommendation based on his hypothesis.
He says, don't go for realism, right, It's gonna be
so hard if you're designing a humanoid robot. Now, a
lot of what we're we're talking about in these episodes
is animation. He's talking primarily about humanoid robots, but typically

(30:22):
these uh two fields get somewhat conflated in discussion of
the Uncanny Valley, because in both cases you're trying to
create something that looks pleasingly human. Um. He wrote, it's
gonna be so hard to get out of the valley
up the second peak, that that's the reality peak is
so steep. Instead, roboticists should not try, and instead they

(30:42):
should aim for the very tip of the first peak.
Stick on the cuteness peak because we know we can
get there. Think think Wally or other cute humanoid robots.
The first peak is not really that hard to attain.
People respond well to it, So why do you need
to try to go past it? Um? You know. As
for animated humans, I think a good analogy might be here.

(31:04):
Here's one Pixars The Incredibles versus Final Fantasy The Spirits,
within which we already mentioned. The former they don't look
like real humans at all, right, they're cute, cartoonish, non
realistic humans, but they're quite pleasant. The latter goes for
and fails at photo realism and creates these characters that
are stiff and unsettling. In other words, he says, don't

(31:26):
try to climb out of the valley. Just don't go
into the valley to begin with. Yeah, this this really
brings to mind just the idea of like filmmakers and
creators standing on the the the edge of this physical
valley and there's a local guide. They're saying, don't do it.
Don't do it, the value will consume you. And they're like, no,
we're Lucasfilm. We can do it. Yeah, we got all
this high text gear. There's no way that anything's gonna

(31:49):
take us down there. And then they go down there
and it's just Jurassic Parker congo with They just get
torn apart. You know, I do. I do think the
dinosaurs in Jurassic Park come out of the uncanny valley
for dinosaurs. They do. Yeah, And that introduces an interesting
wrinkle in that, like Maury is talking about human wide qualities,

(32:09):
it would probably be a related but different thing to
just say animal reality versus specifically human reality. Yeah, because
I mean when for non human creatures, certainly we've been
able to nail that. For ages to stop motion creatures,
often even if their movements are kind of herky jerky,
they feel great. Um that heard of stop motion robots

(32:33):
in older films, So that I've never had a problem
buying into them, and yeah, you're look into the eye
of the track or the t rex or the velociraptor
and you never doubt for a second. Yeah. But so
one thing I think we should point out is that
as prescient as Mori was of what would become this
widely recognized pop culture phenomenon his paper, it's not it's

(32:55):
not research, really, it's just sort of observation and interesting speculation.
So what we should shift now to do, I think,
is talk about whether there's really any evidence that the
Uncanny Valley number one exists at all? Is it really
a thing number two? Is it a is it a
unified phenomenon, or is it there there's some separate things

(33:15):
getting pulled into the net together here. And then finally
maybe we should look at if it's real, what causes it?
Why do human brains tend to react this way? So
maybe we should take a quick break, and then when
we come back we will get into more recent research. Thank. Okay,

(33:35):
So there's there's really no denying that there is some
kind of creepy humanoid synthetic figure effect. Right. We we've
all seen these c g I movies, We've all seen
these creepy robots and had that feeling of don't like it.
But that doesn't necessarily mean that the uncanny Valley, as
described by Mori or as popularly conceived in culture, is

(33:59):
in fact a correct description of what's happening there. Right
just because it it feels truthy, just because it lines
up with to a certain degree with how we feel
about the world, doesn't mean that it is. You know,
that it is an actual effect that's taking place, and
or that it's even a fixed effect, etcetera. There are
a lot of factors to contemplate here, Like for my

(34:21):
own part, I've always found it interesting and I definitely
think there's something to it. However, you line it up
with similar cases in life, such as say, individuals that
you may encounter who have some degree of facial disfigurement,
and it might be extremely mild. It might be it
might be nothing more than a uh in then you

(34:43):
know a lazy eye, or or you know some sort
of cleft lip or cleft palate to scenario it, or
it just might be like their faces maybe not all
that symmetrical, and you know nobody whose face is perfectly symmetrical.
But with all of these individual rules, you interact with them,
you get to know them maybe, and whatever kind of

(35:05):
like initial um reaction is present, be it just kind
of a huh or that goes away, and you can
unless you're a total jerk, unless you're a total jerk,
or you're gonna be able to relate to that person.
You're gonna be able to communicate with that person, and
you're not going to be thrown for a curve every
time they make eye contact with you. Yeah, I would

(35:25):
agree with that. So there is certainly, like in Maury's
original formulation, he he would, I think, put different kinds
of um physical abnormality somewhere on the ascending slope, on
the on the on the uncanny valley slope. So you
have a normal, healthy human up at the peak, I
guess somewhere below the artistic ideal of the great Buddhist

(35:46):
statue or something. But you'd have normal, healthy human. Then
somewhere below them would be people who have who look
like there is something wrong with them in terms of
having uh, you know, perfect health and symmetricality. I mean
so because just an ill person, you encounter someone who
is clearly a little bit sick or a little bit
hungover or whatever. You can tell and it it causes

(36:08):
a light to go off in your head. Yeah. Uh.
And and yet we can quite easily adapt to people
like you know, you see somebody like that, it is
you just know, it is not proper to react to
somebody with revulsion. Oh yeah, like right now in Atlanta
as we're recording, this pollen is everywhere. So there are
several people in my life. I'm not really affected by

(36:29):
the pollen so much, but it totally debilitates some of
my coworkers, some of my friends and red face puffy eyes. Yeah.
And and sometimes they're like walked out on allergy medication
to boot and you just get you just you know,
you accept it. You realize, oh, well, you know, my
my friend here is going to be kind of a
pollen zombie for a couple of weeks. But that doesn't

(36:51):
mean we can't hang out. It doesn't mean we can't
work on this or that. Yeah. So definitely, The Uncanny
Valley has plenty of critics, and plenty I think a
very fair criticisms leveled at it. I just want to
go back to one popular article I came across a
two thousand ten article in Popular Mechanics by Eric Softge,

(37:13):
where he sort of points out that at the time,
people were, as I think they are still now treating
the Uncanny Valley as a proven fact, but in fact,
at the time, he says, you know, there's really almost
no convincing evidence that such a thing even exists, and
he speaks to an expert named Carl McDorman, director of
the Android Science Center at Indiana University, and McDorman, who

(37:35):
has conducted research on the valley, offered his opinion in
the article, saying quote, it turns out that there may
be more than one Uncanny Valley. It's not the overall
degree of human likeness that makes a robot or animated
character uncanny. It's more a matter of mismatch. If you
have an extremely realistic skin texture, but at the same
time cartoonish eyes or realistic eyes and an unrealistic skin texture,

(38:00):
that's very uncanny, uh and the art. So that's an
idea about the perceptual mismatch that I do want to
revisit later in this episode. But the article also speaks
to a guy named David Hanson who's a roboticist who
specifically specializes in creating very realistic humanoid robots. I think
he did that that Einstein head thing. Oh yeah, nothing. Uh. So,

(38:22):
Hansen claims that even if people find overly realistic robots
creepy at first, they get used to them within minutes.
This is sort of what you were just talking about.
I think, you know, you become acclimated even to something
that you might uh at some kind of base level,
have a negative reaction to. Yeah. I keep thinking of
aving in isolation in this because it's the game I'm

(38:44):
currently playing, and uh, and I feel like that the
c g I characters are are are pretty well done
in there. I haven't felt that the tinge of of
Uncanny Valley so washing over me. Some of the voice
actings a little weak. But but but speaking of the voice,
like the that the androids you encounter though with the
sexs and uh androids that key. Yeah, and when I

(39:06):
first on Canny Valley, well yeah, but when I first
encountered them, yeah, they had the uncanny intentionally kind of
creepy appearance and the very creepy robot voice. But yet
when they were not actively attacking me, I kind of was.
I was kind of cool with it. It wasn't until
heded becoming violent. That that that the mere sound of
their voice or the appearance of one UH down the

(39:27):
you know, in the distance down the hallway, would would
cause my nerves to react. I mean, those things are
funny there, h They're a good part of that game.
But anyway, so in this UH article, the author also
cites some other unnamed robot roboticists, as well as his
own experience when he's talking about meeting robots that he
had previously seen on video, and one thing he says is,

(39:50):
you know, an Uncanny Valley effect that was present when
I saw a video of this robot went away when
I saw it in person. I don't know if that's
generally true of people, he claims it's true. But even
if this is truly the case for robots, I'm not
sure how it would apply to animations. Probably wouldn't apply
to animations. UM. But I think that there are some

(40:11):
good threads to start tugging at here, because it's probably
the case that there are more dimensions to the Uncanny
Valley than more he imagined in nineteen seventy, meaning more
than just that X axis of um closeness to realistic
human appearance versus distance from realistic human appearance. Yeah, I

(40:31):
mean just that what makes a person human, what makes
a lightness human. There's arguably a whole chorus of things
going on there. Yeah, so it would make sense that
that that chorus would play into the Uncanny Valley. Yeah.
So I do think that there are multiple other dimensions
to be explored. But I also don't think that means
we can conclude that there's nothing to the Uncanny Valley.

(40:51):
And in the past decade there's actually been an explosion
of research on the Uncanny Valley. So I think we
should look at a few interesting studies on the effect.
All right, well, uh, first one here that I came
across was a two thousand nine Princeton University study and
they looked into the effects of uncanny avowe of the
Uncanny Valley on macaque monkeys, so so non human subjects. Yeah,

(41:15):
because that that makes sense, right if you if you
want to see if this is an evolved response, let's
look beyond the complications of human intelligence and human culture
and looked something closely related to us. Is it biological
rather than say cultural? Right, And so they showed a
selection of the primates close to real quote unquote computer
visuals of macaques to see if they responded with coups

(41:38):
and lip smacking as they do with their fellow monkeys. Uh.
And these these close to real computer visuals were essentially
lawnmower man monkeys. If you see they kind of asking
if I've seen lawnmower man. You know I've seen lawn man. Yes,
so yeah, think a lot more man. Uh and you
kind of have an idea that that level of compute animation,

(42:01):
and the monkeys did not want any part of it,
and they averted their eyes, they acted frightened when confronted
with lawnmower man monkey. So it's not much, i admit,
but it's a little experimental evidence for the argument that
uncanny valley is an evolutionary response. Right, so if you
can observe it in monkeys, there's probably some element of

(42:21):
it that that is biological in the brain. It's instinctual
and not just something we've all learned to say about
weirdly looking animated characters and robots. And that would be
maybe a weak piece of evidence, but still a piece
of evidence you could put in the column of saying
there is something there. The valley does to some extent
exist now the next study that I ran across. This

(42:45):
comes back, this to one of the graphics that you
pulled out of the believe the original uh study correct? Yeah, yeah,
the original Morey's original graphs. So in this graph and
we talked about diving down into the valley and then
steadily try to claw yourself out on the other side,
very very steep ascent. Yeah, so you hit bottom and
that's where you have a zombie and as you begin

(43:08):
to scale out of the uncanny valley, he has um uh,
myoelectric hand and prosthetic hand down there. As you climb
back up, eventually hitting ordinary doll and and puppets and
ill person and maybe hitting healthy person at the very top. Again.
But it's interesting you have prosthetic hand down there, because
this next study looks at prosthetic and robotic and human hands. Yeah,

(43:31):
this is in the original study. More He talks about
the variable creepiness of prosthetic hands. And I found I
found this interesting because I don't know about you, but
but growing up I felt like crazy robot hands. Especially
we're everywhere like every G. I. Joe show or Heman
type franchise, there's always somebody it could be a villain,

(43:52):
it could be a hero. But there were crazy robot
hands galore, UH, and I always found them cool, and
I feel like a lot of us probably even fetishize
them to a certain point, Like we we didn't understand
what it would necessarily be like to lose and lose
a hand and the shortfall and the ability of technology
at the time and even today to replace that missing limb.

(44:15):
But we thought, well, that looks cool. Superpowered robot hands
signed me up, right. But back to the study two
thousand thirteen University of Manchester study, and they looked at
prosthetic hands. UH. They used of forty three right handed participants,
thirty six female and seven male, and they were all
looking at photos, and the photos were divided into three categories.

(44:35):
Human hands, robotic hands like, no question about it, that's
a robot hand I'm looking at like straight up terminator
exoskeleton or or or even less human, and then prosthetic hands.
The results, I have to say, reading through some some
of the writing about this UH and the original press release,
the results were kind of confusing sounding. They the subjects

(44:57):
here preferred human hands and robot hands, but but rated
and certainly rated prosthetic hands is more uncanny, but prosthetics
that looked more human were less eerie. Okay, So so
something that's clearly a robot that's not too creepy. Something's
clearly a human that's not too creepy. If something is
a robot trying to be human, that might be more creepy,

(45:19):
but as it gets better at being human, it's less creepy,
I think. So, I think that's my take. I mean,
it also makes me wonder if if the hand alone
is an is like a subset of the uncanny valet,
because certainly if you're if you're just working with a
hand and trying to replicate the movements, the look, the
feel of a human limb for an observer, not we're

(45:42):
not going to even get into the the you know,
the problems of creating something that the user can experience
as a lifelike limb. But if you're just looking at it,
if you don't have to worry about its eye contact,
you don't have to worry about micro expressions. Uh, it
seems like it would be an easier peak to surmount. Yeah,
so the if that is in fact the correct interpretation,

(46:02):
that would seem to undercut the steepness in Maury's original
graph right on the on the final peak. Yeah, that's
I mean, that's what I'm wondering. Because the hand had
taken in isolation, is thinking would be easier to replicate. Yeah.
Uh and Uncanny Valley. Let's face it, when we talk
about it, most of the time we're talking about faces.

(46:24):
Right now, Speaking of faces, there's another study. UM. This
is a two thousand and eleven University of California, San
Diego study. UM. This was published in the Social Cognitive
and Effective Neuroscience, and they did exactly what you'd expect
researchers to do when confronted with the Uncanny Valley. Grab
the f m r I and see what our brains

(46:45):
are doing when we're looking at all these images. So
all these fMRI I studies, all right, well, what what
did they find? All right, I'll roll through the basics
of the study here? So twenty subjects, not a not
a huge study here, aged thirty six. And here were
some of the the caveats they had in selecting these individuals.
No experience working with robots, no time spent in Japan,

(47:07):
no friends or family from Japan because they wanted to
avoid uh any you know, potential cultural exposure that would
have made them, would make them more accepting of androids. Okay,
So the idea is that maybe in Japan people just
experience humanoid robots way too much already there too, they're
acclimatized to them. Yeah, that that's the the argument they made,

(47:29):
and laying out the study, let's let's not even go there,
let's just deal with people who have less exposure to robots.
And they were shown twelve videos of a humanoid robot
named repley Q two. Oh man, I'm looking it up
right now. It's it's it's rough, but well, they watched
video twelve videos of this robot doing various things, and
they were shown videos of humans doing the same things.

(47:52):
And in fact, the robots movements and mannerisms were patterned
directly after the humans. So you had a you had
a human version of the actions, you had an android
version of the actions, uh, you know, a lifelike robot,
and then you had a a stripped down version of
the androids. So basically the android with all its skin
ripped off, so it looks more like a robot, clearly

(48:13):
a robot, and it's doing the same motions as well.
So this broke it all down to a human with
biological appearance in movement, a robot with mechanical appearance and
mechanical motion, and a human seeming agent with the exact
same mechanical movements as the robot. Then in came the
f M R I scans. So the main brain area

(48:36):
of note here, the the area that that that that
lit up where we saw the most activity, the parietal
cortex on both sides of the brain, specifically in the
areas that connect the part of the brain's visual cortex
that process bodily movements with the section of the motor
cortex thought to contain mirror neurons. So those would be

(48:57):
like the the empathy parts of the brain where you know,
we we see something going on in some other creature
like us, and we empathize with it. Exactly. Yeah, So
when viewing the human looking android, the brain lit up
at the recognition of a human form, but registered essentially
a computing error over the movement. Something didn't match up.

(49:18):
Uh so it's it's not. According to this study, it
would seem that it's not the biological movement or the
biological appearance, it's the congruents or lack of congruents between
the two. You look alive but you're dead, you look
dead but you move you or you speak as if
you're alive. Uh. So the researchers noted that this is
something that could be retuned through exposure, but it could

(49:41):
be at the heart of what's going on with the
Uncanny Valley. Interesting. Well, I think we should look at
one more study, uh, potentially providing recent support for the
existence of the Uncanny Valley, and then maybe after that
we should break and then come back next time to
get into the causes, what what would be causing this
effect and uh and future. So I want to look

(50:02):
at a study that came out in two six in
the journal Cognition by Mather and Rifling called Navigating a
Social World with Robot Partners. A Quantitative cartography of the
Uncanny Valley. Cute invocation of map making there because it
does kind of make sense. I like the idea of
mapping the valley because that indicates that it may expand

(50:23):
beyond just the one dimensional dip and is in fact
more of a topographical space, you know, like we can
extend into three dimensions. But anyway, So to get into
the study, the author's note that while the Uncanny Valley
has very strong intuitive support, people tend to take it
as fact, experimental evidence for it has been limited and inconsistent.

(50:43):
As as we mentioned earlier, some studies seem to find
evidence for the valley, others don't you know, they say this,
This isn't necessarily a thing. So there are multiple experiments here. First,
they did a thing that I think was pretty smart.
If they were trying to chart a linear progression of
the up and down peaks and valleys, they tried to

(51:04):
generate an objectively determined gradient of more and less human
looking robots. So what a lot of these studies do
is maybe along the macaques study ideas, they show you
a lawnmower man, they show you a real person, they
show you a robot, uh, and they ask you to
characterize you know, how do you feel about these? What
they did here is that they gathered a very large

(51:27):
sample or relatively large sample of eighty images quote from
the wild meaning from the Internet. So these wild type
robots samples, and they had a bunch of inclusion and
exclusion criteria. I don't want to get into all of them,
but they tried to limit it to where it would
it would kind of throw out all these variables they
could complicate things like they tried to keep just certain

(51:48):
types of pictures of faces of real robots that are
built and uh and they had some exclusion criteria like
it couldn't be a well known character of a famous person.
Uh um, it couldn't have objects overlapping the face, It
couldn't be a toy, it had to be a real
humanoid robot. And then they had subjects rate these images

(52:09):
on what they call the mechano Humanoid scale, basically to
come up with an objectively derived score for each image
by using this this empirical research, by going to a
bunch of people and saying, hey, how mechanical is this?
How human is this? And then after they had a
rating for each of these eight images, and Robert have
included an image, uh, I think down here to show you,

(52:32):
like what all these robots where you can kind of see.
It starts with things that look not human at all,
just like a lump of wires and junk, and then
it proceeds up to something that looks like a picture
of a guy. Yes, yeah, very much. Though you start
off with very kind of wallyesque heads. Then you move

(52:52):
in through like like skinless gremlins, and then through the
sort of the the expected hierarchy of umanoid robots. Okay,
so they've got this thing, and then they rate all
these images and sort them into an ascending scale of humanness.
And then they took ratings in multiple different ways of
likability and trustworthiness. Now, in likability, they claimed to find

(53:16):
a robust uncanny Valley effect, where likability increased linearly with
humanoid qualities up to a certain point, and then it
took a negative dip as the humanoid qualities continued to
increase past that point, and then once again began to
rise at the far end of the scale. Now, one
thing I want to say, just looking at the results
is it does not appear that people were the most

(53:39):
bothered by the things that were the most human looking.
Like given my understanding of the uncanny valley, I would
have expected the stuff at the very top end of
the scale to be the most disturbing. But they actually
kind of liked the stuff at the very top end
of the scale. It was somewhere closer to the upper
half middle of the scale that they really didn't like.

(54:00):
Um So, to whatever extent, there is a real uncanny Valley,
it might not lie so close to the quote realism
into the spectrum as we think. They also performed some
trust experiments by creating a scenario where subjects would be
asked to trust these robots to invest money for them,
and the results there were basically they claimed that the
trust uh experiments did show some Uncanny Valley effects, but

(54:24):
the results were a little more complicated than on the
straightforward superficial likability scale, the likability really did look like
Uncanny Valley was being displayed. They also performed experiments with
a more traditional quote controlled series of composed face images,
so would just be a series of basically the same

(54:44):
face as a robot than a little bit more human,
a little bit more human, little bit more human on
this gradient of human nous. And they generally claimed to
find that there was evidence for the Uncanny Valley effect
in both likability and trust with both the why caught
robot image samples and with these composed face images that

(55:04):
they came up with. But as always, more studies are needed.
But that looks like there is one study showing pretty
solid evidence that there is something like an uncanny Valley effect. Yeah,
and I like the idea that that that that it's
it's an uncanny valley, but maybe it's just a more
more nuanced from a a topographical standpoint. You know, they're

(55:27):
they're more a little little bumps and little valleys within
the overall valley, little caves you can crawl into and
just yourself inside, and maybe even caves that turn into
tunnels that emerge on the other side. Yeah, that that's
an interesting thing. I mean, like they point out that
there's a lot of variability in their data. Actually, like
it wasn't um If you look at their their plot

(55:48):
chart of where all the data points fall and then
they plot a line going through it. If you plot
a line going through all their data, it does show
the uncanny valley effect. But you know, there there are
outliers all over the place, like there is some there
are some robots that are just consistently more like more
than the other ones. I find it interestingly that the

(56:08):
some of the higher rated ones, or at least uh
I think what number seventy nine in particular, kind of
looks like a generic human as opposed to say, go
down to seventy four that looks like a very specific
human like if I had to pick him or pick
the human he's patterned after, assumingly out of a police lineup,

(56:30):
I feel like I'd be able to do it. But
also seventy four looks angry. I'm sorry, folks, you can't
see what we're talking about, but it's frowning at you,
kind of like should I kill all humans or just
shrug it off? And maybe two day's the day that
does introduce There are a lot of complicating factors here,
and the authors acknowledged this, like, these images don't all

(56:50):
have necessarily the same emotional affect, like some of them
seem happy, some seem unhappy. There's enough variability across the
board that you can think you're getting a reasonably decent
answer when you plot reactions across all samples. But yeah,
there's definitely a lot of different stuff going on here
in addition to just being more or less human. I

(57:12):
like how thirty four on our on our chart here
it seems to rely heavily on animated mustache and eyebrows.
Oh yeah, what is that? It looks like a It
looks like a very mustache. I can't add to what
you've just said. It's got a white mustache and brow
and beard, and it's saying by it looks like a
lot of these incomplete puppets are stripped away puppets, you

(57:34):
see where they're like, all right, we got a lot
of work to do on this thing, but at least
we got the eyebrows in a mustache in place. But see,
I find that one very likable. It doesn't look very
human at all, but it's very I want to play
with it. Yeah, okay, Robert, Well, we've got a bunch
of more stuff to talk about, but I think we
should call it there and come back and finish our
discussion of the Uncanny Valley next time. Yeah, we'll get
into we'll go beyond the Uncanny Valley. Yeah, so we'll

(57:56):
we'll talk about what might cause the Uncanny Valley effect
to what it were extent it does exist, and we
can talk about you know, what happens when you ascend
that that far slow? All right? Well, hey, in the meantime,
head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
That is where you will find all the podcast episodes.
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(58:17):
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(58:48):
and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works
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(59:11):
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