The so-called Uncanny Valley (in Italian “mysterious valley”) is that feeling of unease that many of us experience when we look at an inanimate object with some human appearance. Have you ever observed, for example, a robot with humanoid features, but also a doll with a fairly realistic appearance or the avatar of a video game, feeling a strange sensation, of unease? Well, you are not the only ones. It is in fact a phenomenon that has been identified and studied for some time, even if not systematically. The term was coined by the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Moriand the phenomenon would not be limited to robots, but would also be applicable to other types of human-like objects, such as dolls, masks, facial caricatures, avatar in virtual reality and personages in computer graphics movies. But why would such a feeling arise?
What is the effect ofUncanny Valley
In 1970 Masahiro Moria professor of robotics at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, wrote a paper in which he hypothesized that the emotional response of a person in front of a humanoid robot would have abruptly switched from empathy to repulsionwhere the person noticed that the robot was approaching a 100% realistic “human” appearance, without actually reaching it fully. In other words, the more a robot tends towards realism without being perfect, that is, effectively indistinguishable from a real person, the more it would cause repulsion. This “descent into uneasiness” is known as the “uncanny valley” and is represented by the following graph (Figure 1):
The emotional responses people’s attitudes towards robots with human features (in a term “anthropomorphic”) would be increasingly positive until a certain pointbeyond which the feedback would quickly become intense repulsion. This would happen when it takes a moment to realize that what seemed completely human in reality it is not. On the one hand, in fact, it would trigger a sense of deception and then the fear of being in front of something unknown and perhaps malevolent, on the other hand the similar but “wrong” features of the robot would be linked in our mind to the unconscious idea of being in the presence of an individual with potential diseases. So, again, our brain would warn us.
Some examples of Uncanny Valley
To further understand theUncanny Valley Let’s take the example of a prosthesis of a hand (in the graph Prosthetic Hand) that has been made with a high degree of resemblance to a human hand. If we hold this hand thinking it is made of skin and bones, but realize that what at first glance seemed real to us is in fact artificial, we will probably experience a feeling of uneasiness. For example, we might be surprised by its consistency and coldness. When this happens, we lose our sense of affinity and the hand unsettles us. The effect has also been observed in the presence of stuffed animals or inanimate bodies (e.g. cadavers).
Many directors of horror movie have deliberately exploited this phenomenon to heighten the audience’s sense of fear and terror. A classic example is Frankenstein’s monster, an abomination that exists in a realm between the living and the dead, simultaneously eliciting sympathy and disgust.
Although the theory has attracted a great deal of interest to date, there is not enough evidence to prove its validity, especially because the way in which robot-androids are perceived can vary from culture to culture and from subject to subject, thus also influencing the dimensions and negative values of the disturbing zone. To confirm it or not and possibly systematize it, it will therefore be necessary further studies needed.
