There's a well known concept in human psychology called "The Uncanny Valley."
For those of you not familiar with it, here's a quick run down.
In 1970 a successful Japanese robotic engineer named Masahiro Mori noticed that as he added human-like features to his robots, people seemed to like them more. But as more and more human features got added something... weird happened. There came a point when people stopped liking the robots and instead started getting creeped out, even disgusted or outright scared of them. People could still be impressed by their technical attributes, but they didn't "warm up" to them as easily, if at all.
So if a person sees a purely non-human looking robot, something purely industrial like you'd see on an automobile assembly line, they don't provoke an emotional reaction. Add some human features like a more humanoid form, like ASIMO, and we like it more. But take it too far, make it look too human, especially when things like synthetic skin, realistic looking eyes, and simulated facial expressions started getting added, and some weird tipping point happens... on some base mental level we stop perceiving the robot as a robot with human characteristics and start seeing it a human... with something terribly wrong with it. On a base non-aware emotional level it stops being a "Human-like robot" and starts being "Flawed human."
And to be clear I'm not talking any sort of intellectual level where we can't tell the difference. As it stands even the most realistic robots can't be actually mistaken for a human for any real length of time. It's a more basic, non-aware level. To vastly, vastly over simplify a lot of complicated neurology we have mental pathways set up for mental process we do a lot of. And recognition of the human form is probably one of the most used ones.
You see the human form, how it looks, how it moves is something we all know on a very intimate level. Recognizing members of our own species, recognizing when members of our species have a "flaw" due to sickness or deformity, all the countless subtle motions and facial expressions that make up so much of our non-verbal communications, these are things we all know on a very deep level without necessarily being aware of it.
So when a human is "off"... we know it. We might not be aware of it consciously or be able to verbalize why, but we know. So when something is human enough for us to process it those mental pathways we normally use for humans... it backfires.
Later others expanded on Mori's concept and related it to the Freud, Jung, and Jentsch concepts of the uncanny, the uncomfortable intellectual and emotional state of something being both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.
Now originally this concept was applied mostly to robotics, but it has started to be applied to other fields as well.
Both video games and computer animated have hit this wall hard in their continued push for more photo-realistic graphics. The Uncanny Valley is often put forth as a reason for the failure of movies such The Polar Express and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.
But there has been some interesting attempts to apply this to other less obvious fields as well.
David Kadavy, later expanded on by Vsauce's Michael Stevens, suggest that one of the reasons the notorious Comic Sans font has become such a hate sink among designers (so much that it has spilled over into popular culture) is that the font, originally designed to mimic human handwriting for use in speech bubbles in the ill fated Microsoft Bob program, hits in the Uncanny Valley because it looks enough like natural hand writing for use to see it not as a good font, but as bad handwriting.
Similarly game designer James Portnow says that one reason that Microsoft's Kinect motion control sensor hasn't caught on while Nintendo's WiiMote has is that the Kinect operates in the Uncanny Valley of controllers.
Humans have the wonderful ability to conceptualize tool use. When you are in a car and come to a curve in the road you think "I'm going to turn left." you don't think "I'm going to turn the steering wheel of my car therefore making the car turn left" even though you intellectually know that is what is happening. So humans can see tools as extensions of themselves and can sort of bypass the tool mentally. You ever have those moments where you are painting a picture or playing an instrument or whatnot and the paintbrush or instrument just sorta... fade out mentally? It's a useful and handy mental shortcut.
So there is no cognitive dissonance when you press an analog stick to make an onscreen character walk. We understand we are using a tool and we as a species have gotten really good at just mentally ignoring that. But the Kinect is different. If you are standing in front of your TV and make your character walk forward by say walking in place or holding one leg out, as many Kinect games do, we hit the same brick wall. Sure it's much closer then pushing a control pad, but that's the problem. It stops being "I'm going to make my character on screen walk using this tool in my hand" and starts being "I'm going to make my character walk by doing something that is almost walking yet isn't and Oh God this feels so weird and wrong."
For those of you not familiar with it, here's a quick run down.
In 1970 a successful Japanese robotic engineer named Masahiro Mori noticed that as he added human-like features to his robots, people seemed to like them more. But as more and more human features got added something... weird happened. There came a point when people stopped liking the robots and instead started getting creeped out, even disgusted or outright scared of them. People could still be impressed by their technical attributes, but they didn't "warm up" to them as easily, if at all.
So if a person sees a purely non-human looking robot, something purely industrial like you'd see on an automobile assembly line, they don't provoke an emotional reaction. Add some human features like a more humanoid form, like ASIMO, and we like it more. But take it too far, make it look too human, especially when things like synthetic skin, realistic looking eyes, and simulated facial expressions started getting added, and some weird tipping point happens... on some base mental level we stop perceiving the robot as a robot with human characteristics and start seeing it a human... with something terribly wrong with it. On a base non-aware emotional level it stops being a "Human-like robot" and starts being "Flawed human."
And to be clear I'm not talking any sort of intellectual level where we can't tell the difference. As it stands even the most realistic robots can't be actually mistaken for a human for any real length of time. It's a more basic, non-aware level. To vastly, vastly over simplify a lot of complicated neurology we have mental pathways set up for mental process we do a lot of. And recognition of the human form is probably one of the most used ones.
You see the human form, how it looks, how it moves is something we all know on a very intimate level. Recognizing members of our own species, recognizing when members of our species have a "flaw" due to sickness or deformity, all the countless subtle motions and facial expressions that make up so much of our non-verbal communications, these are things we all know on a very deep level without necessarily being aware of it.
So when a human is "off"... we know it. We might not be aware of it consciously or be able to verbalize why, but we know. So when something is human enough for us to process it those mental pathways we normally use for humans... it backfires.
Later others expanded on Mori's concept and related it to the Freud, Jung, and Jentsch concepts of the uncanny, the uncomfortable intellectual and emotional state of something being both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.
Now originally this concept was applied mostly to robotics, but it has started to be applied to other fields as well.
Both video games and computer animated have hit this wall hard in their continued push for more photo-realistic graphics. The Uncanny Valley is often put forth as a reason for the failure of movies such The Polar Express and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.
But there has been some interesting attempts to apply this to other less obvious fields as well.
David Kadavy, later expanded on by Vsauce's Michael Stevens, suggest that one of the reasons the notorious Comic Sans font has become such a hate sink among designers (so much that it has spilled over into popular culture) is that the font, originally designed to mimic human handwriting for use in speech bubbles in the ill fated Microsoft Bob program, hits in the Uncanny Valley because it looks enough like natural hand writing for use to see it not as a good font, but as bad handwriting.
Similarly game designer James Portnow says that one reason that Microsoft's Kinect motion control sensor hasn't caught on while Nintendo's WiiMote has is that the Kinect operates in the Uncanny Valley of controllers.
Humans have the wonderful ability to conceptualize tool use. When you are in a car and come to a curve in the road you think "I'm going to turn left." you don't think "I'm going to turn the steering wheel of my car therefore making the car turn left" even though you intellectually know that is what is happening. So humans can see tools as extensions of themselves and can sort of bypass the tool mentally. You ever have those moments where you are painting a picture or playing an instrument or whatnot and the paintbrush or instrument just sorta... fade out mentally? It's a useful and handy mental shortcut.
So there is no cognitive dissonance when you press an analog stick to make an onscreen character walk. We understand we are using a tool and we as a species have gotten really good at just mentally ignoring that. But the Kinect is different. If you are standing in front of your TV and make your character walk forward by say walking in place or holding one leg out, as many Kinect games do, we hit the same brick wall. Sure it's much closer then pushing a control pad, but that's the problem. It stops being "I'm going to make my character on screen walk using this tool in my hand" and starts being "I'm going to make my character walk by doing something that is almost walking yet isn't and Oh God this feels so weird and wrong."
via JREF Forum http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=269086&goto=newpost
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