The uncanny valley of eeriness

Abstract

In 1970, an eminent Japanese roboticist, Masahiro Mori, proposed the "uncanny valley" curve to describe the emotional response of humans to nonhuman agents. At the core of his proposal is the idea that as an agent is made more humanlike, the observer's familiarity does not linearly increase as one would intuit, but falls into a "valley of eeriness," when the agent closely yet imperfectly impersonates a human being. Although Mori used the uncanny valley to describe robots, the hypothesis has been revived to describe emotional responses to computer-animated agents in movies and videogames.