Applications Overcoming the Uncanny Valley

Editor: Mike Potel Applications www.wildcrest.com Overcoming the Uncanny Valley tories about golems—humanlike beings simpli" ed and underlined reality that makes them Tom Geller molded from base clay—have ancient origins visually magnetic.” (The market seems to have in Jewish folklore. According to traditional sided with Ebert, as the movie recouped its $150- Sstories, these soulless creatures serve wise men for million-dollar budget by its ninth week.) both household tasks and community protection. Many who criticized The Polar Express pointed Just as often, golems turn on their masters. But to a short 1970 essay by Japanese roboticist Ma- mindlessness, not malice, fuels their conversions sahiro Mori. The essay’s title, “Bukimi no tani,” to brutality. For these automatons are humanlike is widely translated as “The Uncanny Valley.” In but not quite human—they’re like animated corps- it, Mori gave examples of several types of mov- es, lacking volition and desire. ing and still humanlike images. He posited that, Some say the golems’ nearness to ourselves when such characters approach realistic similar- makes them more frightening than other threats. ity to humans, they stop being likable and instead Whereas a lion might tear our ! esh and a " re become eerie, frightening, repulsive—“uncanny.” might cause greater destruction, golems—even But if the similarity is perfected, the supposition when peaceful—mock us with reminders of how goes, such images would become indistinguishable easily we could lose the warmth that de" nes our from humans and therefore elicit as much attrac- humanity. Scary stories throughout history have tion and sympathy as an ordinary person. Figure 1 featured such characters, varying only slightly (next page) shows Mori’s graphical representation in how their humanity fails. Vampires, zombies, of this idea. aliens, devils ... all are nearly human but lack that The uncanny-valley conjecture has roots in a certain spark of life. To this list of golems, we can 1906 paper by German doctor Ernst Anton Jen- add Gollum, a recent instance captured cinemati- tsch, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny” (“Über cally in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, who lost his die Psychologie des Unheimlichen”). Jentsch dis- goodness through enslavement to the Ring. cussed the fear engendered by “automata” (which act as though alive) and wax " gures (which appear Golems and graphics as though alive). He asserted that the essence of What makes some near-human characters scary this unease comes from uncertainty: is the object while others are merely laughable? More impor- alive or not? Freud later focused on the aesthetic tant, why do some human and humanlike charac- implications of this unease in his 1919 paper, “The ters fail to arouse our sympathy? Visual artists and Uncanny” (“Das Unheimlichen”), further suggest- roboticists face these questions as they seek to al- ing that the fear of death was involved, referring ternately frighten and endear. Recent attempts to to the uncanny effect “in relation to death and create accurate human replicas have brought these dead bodies, to the return of the dead, and to spir- questions to the fore with increased urgency. its and ghosts.” (Mori made this connection clear One often-cited example is the 2004 movie The in his paper, saying, “When we die, we fall into Polar Express, in which director Robert Zemeckis the trough of the uncanny valley.” He also nota- and Sony Pictures Imageworks created fully digital bly placed dead people—corpses and zombies—at its replicas of the actors using Vicon motion-capture deepest point.) technology. The movie was controversial and And yet, anthropomorphic characters that are opened to mixed reviews that alternately com- clearly nonhuman generally don’t cause the “creepy” mended and criticized the effect. CNN reviewer feeling associated with the uncanny valley. Artist Paul Clinton said “[the] human characters in the and author Scott McCloud gives one possible rea- " lm come across as downright ... well, creepy.” On son for human identity with the nonhuman in his the other hand, Roger Ebert at the Chicago Sun- groundbreaking book, Understanding Comics. He Times praised the characters as having “a kind of says that realism shows the outside world as our Published by the IEEE Computer Society 0272-1716/08/$25.00 © 2008 IEEE IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications 11 Applications Uncanny valley + Moving Still Healthy the right side of the graph in Figure 1. Rather, it’s at Bunraku puppet person Humanoid robot the beginning of its own curve, separate from those for 2D and 3D nonphotorealistic animation. Both Fedkiw and roboticist David Hanson (www. hansonrobotics.com) agree that part of the prob- lem lies in how the uncanny valley is perceived. Stuffed animal Hanson, whose "lmmaking and sculpting back- Industrial robot ground informs his work creating realistic human robots, said, “Mori put forth the uncanny valley Familiarity as speculation, not as a true scienti"c theory. But he drew it as a graph, and that made it seem more Human likeness 50% 100% scienti"c. It’s not a scienti"c hypothesis that was Corpse Prosthetic hand tested with data, though.” Even if the uncanny-valley conjecture isn’t sci- – ence per se, scientists have widely tested the broader Zombie question of how human forms and behavior are perceived. However, comparatively little research has Figure 1. eyes see it, while the vague outlines of “cartoony” examined the uncanny-valley conjecture itself, and Masahiro characters are how we see ourselves with our inner Hanson has decried many of those studies as “pre- Mori’s eyes. In particular, “furry” animal-human hybrids biased.” By way of proof, he published “Expanding graphical externalize inner concepts of self by appealing to the Aesthetic Possibilities for Humanoid Robots,” representation the iconic status of animal traits—a status that’s a paper describing three thought experiments that of the uncanny cross-cultural and reaches back to the beginning of demonstrate the uncanny valley effect, its opposite, valley. documented history. and a random distribution of “eeriness” that’s un- The graph related to characters’ perceived humanity. Figure 2 demonstrates Is there a valley or not? shows his graphic demonstrating this experiment. a gap in The uncanny-valley conjecture is well known to He also included a small-scale study showing that familiarity as anyone who creates humanlike characters or ma- test subjects found a certain real-life human (ac- near-human chines. But its repercussions—and its limits—extend tor Mitch Cohen as “The Toxic Avenger”) to appear likenesses beyond these "elds, as robotic and animated char- notably eerier than Hanson’s robot replica of Philip approach acters grow ever closer to being indistinguish- K. Dick, as Figure 3 shows (page 14). realism. able from living humanity. Take psychological research, for example: If these androids can pass For animators, style triumphs over truth a Turing test, they could be used to test subjects’ Many animators are also dubious of the uncanny reactions to various human conditions. Yet unlike valley as Mori proposed it—or, at least, of how real people, their features and behaviors could be closely “familiar” and “realistic” are paired in the controlled for iterative experiments, and reactions uncanny-valley conjecture. Sony Pictures Image- to them could be tested in a consistent way. works’ Kenn McDonald, a lead character animator So we have nonrealistic humanoid characters on The Polar Express, pointed to the need for mov- that are attractive, near-realistic humanlike char- iemakers to stylize their characters away from re- acters that repel, and actual humans that engender alism to make them effective, “much like putting familiarity. Does that prove Mori’s uncanny-valley makeup on a !esh-and-blood actor.” Speaking of conjecture? his later work as animation supervisor of the 2007 Many in the "eld say no. "lm Beowulf, McDonald said, “Our intention’s not Ron Fedkiw is one such naysayer. An associate to fool people that it’s actually Anthony Hopkins on professor of computer science at Stanford Uni- the screen—they know it’s not. Instead, we want to versity and a frequent consultant to the movie get something that’s convincing within the realm industry for his work on !uid dynamics and bio- of that world we’re portraying. In Beowulf, there mechanics, he said, “The uncanny valley is usually was a lot of character detail, but our intent was described as [a situation where] the animations never to hit that mark and be truly real.” are getting better, but we have fallen into a valley He pointed to both Beowulf and Lord of the Rings’ where they are worse. I instead feel that we are in Gollum as examples. “A good way to avoid the un- a multidimensional space, and that we are zigzag- canny valley is to move a character’s proportions ging all over the place.” Put another way, he said, and structure outside the range of ‘human.’ One photorealistic animation isn’t in a valley toward reason Gollum was so successful is that he has 12 July/August 2008 + Original Uncanny Valley 8 + Different examples invert + Other examples imply continuum the valley of acceptability 7 3 7 9 5 6 3 2 2 4 1 5 Reaction Reaction 1 Reaction 10 1 2 6 5 4 8 100% 100% 0 4 100% Similarity to human – 3 – – Similarity to human Similarity to human 1 Smiley face 2 Child’s slain stick !gures 1 Industrial robot 1 MIT Laszlo 3 Pokemon 2 Android 2 The motions of Sony’s Qrio 4 MIT Laszlo 3 Moving corpse/uncanny valley 3 Michaelangelo’s Pieta 5 Disney’s Jasmine 4 Prosthetic hand 4 Disney’s Abe Lincoln 6 Ventriloquist’s dummy 5 Handicapped person 5 Andrew Dice Clay 7 Michelangelo’s Pieta 6 Bunraku puppet 8 Moving corpse 7 Unhealthy person 9 Ingrid Bergman 8 Healthy person 10 Michael Jackson Figure 2.

Load more