HORROR THEORY: the uncanny valley

while working on my series on parasocial relationships I ended up getting deeper into robotics than I ever wanted to and bumped up against the concept that I had always found really interesting but had never researched in much detail the uncanny valley I've been meaning to write a horror Theory series anyway and the uncanny valley is a great place to start both is a well known concept that deserves further elaboration and examination and as a companion piece to the parasocial series so welcome to horde this is a serious little service excuse for me to talk about one of my favorite topics horror and draw attention to and support and our challenge a variety of horror related theory that I feel is worth talking about the robots face is made of silicon plastic and to control emotions through facial expressions in hand movements webcomic artist Kelly Turnbull drew an image that sums up the uncanny valley perfectly it's a simplified version of the original graph Masahiro mori made in his essay that introduced the phenomenon and it uses the spectrum of toaster to human to illustrate it basically humans have an affinity for things that are acute cartoonish or unrealistic representation of a person here Turnbull uses the Brave Little Toaster as an example the toaster has emotions and is expressive but obviously isn't trying to trick us into thinking it's human so we aren't threatened or creeped out at all on the opposite end we also have an affinity for real people like Marlon Brando who we can relate to and understand as a person as you get closer and closer to a realistic representation of a person there's a huge dip in affinity where we get creeped out things look off something is almost human but not quite before infinity goes back up when you hit actual person that's the uncanny valley the idea that something that tries to be human and gets close but fails freaks us out way more than something that doesn't try very hard with the valley being the dip in the graph between the first and second Peaks the uncanny valley is not a particularly obscure idea but I wanted to start my series on Hart theory with it because one its history including faulty translations outside challenges to the concept some researchers even insisting that it doesn't exist and the ways in which Morey has changed his mind over the years are all very interesting and aren't nearly as well-known as the concept itself - like I said it serves as a great companion piece to my parasocial series being that it's hard to form relationship with an almost human entity if it creeps you out too much for you to want to get close to it 3 I followed their applications of the theory outside of representing just humans and that something in the valley can elicit emotions other than affinity or fear and for I think that there are ways in which the theory contributes harmful ideas to our society that go unchallenged just generally I wanted to both flesh out the concept and provide an alternative perspective let's backtrack real fast 40 or 50 years in 1970 Masahiro mori published book camino tiny Ginjo an essay about a perceived phenomenon and robotics he assumed would one day be a problem he called the phenomenon the Bohemian itani leukemia meaning eerie and tiny meaning Valley the word uncanny and its connotations became attached separately in 1978 and they were never an intended inclusion by Morrie the first English translation of his essay was also a rush job done in 2005 in about an hour 42 years after it was initially published the essay did not get a more comprehensive accurate and more-- approved English version until 2012 and this translation only used the word uncanny because of established familiarity with the term in association with the theory uncanny and eerie aren't that different in definition but I thought that it was interesting that arguably the most well-known use of the word uncanny in English and the resulting connections to Freud Lacan and others came about as a mistake another aspect lost in the initial translation or in oversimplifications of the concept is Xin wakhan roughly translated as affinity Carl mcdorman who worked on both the rushed 2005 translation and on the more accurate 2012 one said this about the concept of scene Lacan I think it is that feeling of being in the presence of another human being the moment when you feel in synchrony with someone other than yourself and experience a meeting of minds negative scene wakhan the uncanny is when that sense of synchrony falls apart the moment you discover that the one you thought was your soul mate was nothing more than smoke and mirrors this is certainly a more complicated concept than our affinity for an object in an interview from 2012 Maurice said since I was a child I have never liked looking at wax figures they looked somewhat creepy to me at the time electronic prosthetic hands were being developed and they triggered in me the same kind of sensation these experiences had made me start thinking about robots in general which led me to write this essay the young Danny Valle was my intuition when asked about the initial response to his essay Mori said you could say that there was no response the seriousness of both his ideas and of Robotics themselves were initially met with derision more said in those days people didn't think universities should be doing research on robots they thought that it was frivolous to be working on a toy as with anything new there was much opposition and I felt that everyone was against me Mori also devotes an entire section to how movement affects an object or creatures placement on the valley devoting a second line on the graph to it so a full understanding of his theory as initially published must take movement not just aesthetics into account on places like Fortune copypasta referred to something copied and pasted again and again so creepypasta was an extension of the phrase referring to short simple horror story is designed to be shared over and over usually written and posted anonymously around 2009 to 2011 I was really into creepypasta and even put out one of my own the culture of creepypasta has since changed a lot and I have not kept up with it at all but I remember one from back then called genetic memory pretty clearly due to me having seen it pop up again and again years ago and because of how short simple and effective it is here it is in its entirety many classic horror icons such as Geiger xenomorphs silent Hills Pyramid Head and other disturbing creatures share common characteristics pale skin dark sunken eyes elongated faces sharp teeth and the like these images inspire horror and revulsion and many and with good reason the characteristics shared by these faces are imprinted on the human mind many things frighten humans instinctively the fear is natural and does not need to be reinforced in order to terrify the fears our species wide stemming from dark times in the past when lightning could mean the burning of your tree home Thunder could be the approaching gallops of a stampede predators could hide in darkness and heights can make poor footing lethal the question you have to ask yourself is this what happens deep in the hidden eras before history began that could affect the entire human race so evenly as to give the entire species a deep instinctual and lasting fear of pale beings with dark sunken eyes razor-sharp teeth and elongated faces just be careful out there I think it's a well-written creepypasta but what is centrally proposed as a haunting question in reality has a flat obvious answer what it describes are either characteristics of predators or characteristics of dead or diseased human beings the idea of all of these characteristics being compiled into some ancient forgotten monster is creepy but it falls apart pretty quickly since they're all inherently creepy by themselves in Morrie's original essay about the valley he said why were we equipped with this eerie sensation is it essential for human beings I have not yet considered these questions deeply but I have no doubt it is an integral part of our instinct for self-preservation as a note he added that the sense of eeriness is probably a form of instinct that protects us from proximal rather than distal sources of danger proximal sources of danger are corpses members of different species and other entities we can closely approach distal sources of danger include wind storms and floods it's striking to me that this essay from the 70s has a similar thought process to an unrelated creepypasta written many years later and I was reminded of this concept while researching the uncanny valley because there's been a struggle to get to the bottom of why what resides in the valley creeps us out so much it doesn't help that the idea itself initially came from a simple proposed hypothesis with no experiments or studies to back it up that was mostly just ignored for years without catching on Maury said pointing out the existence of the uncanny valley was more a piece of advice for me two people who design robots rather than a scientific statement he did explicitly mention horror though saying that the idea of mannequins moving would be like a horror story this was something my friends and I exploited for a short film one where my friend Devin makes fun of an ominous mannequin head so stupid and is then cursed [Music] Mauri also talked about how the speed of a robot's smile can take it from happy to creepy and my video games essay I referenced a part of a Silent Hill to making up documentary that describes how the game also minds this to evoke unease and players the designers on that game made human s monsters then deliberately undercut their humanity including by giving them unnatural jerky movements parcel token canals Dakota did it so currently ago started a ticket okay I managed to motivation on that did work or solos every day cicadas man no estaba en el chavo one color up on a Swedish motorcar it's what the hacker ethos little token so your cap time standard you brought this to Tahoe it's not just Chicago yesterday so they need a sedative our managed to grab a terminal keeper all right scooter start the car so at some point in 2014 catches zipper ik and Rachel McDonnell used the same motion capture recordings to animate two different avatars but this one described as highly appealing friendly and familiar being found preferable to this one designed to have the appearance of disease and which was rated as both unappealing and eerie particularly when moving with the exact same animations and audio the difference was especially apparent when the personalities that ill style was trying to act out were agreeableness and conscientiousness in fact angela tin will mark Grimshaw and Andrew Williams published a piece called uncanny behavior and survival horror games in 2010 the study indicated that attributes of motion and sound do exaggerate the uncanny phenomenon and how frightening that character is perceived to be strong correlations where I identified for the perceived strangeness of a character with how human-like a character's voice sounded how human-like the facial expression appeared and how synchronized the characters sound was with lip movement characters rated as the least synchronized were perceived to be the most frightening they mentioned how a 2006 tech demo for heavy rain featured a character with off sync lip synchronization that was unintentionally interpreted as creepy and uncanny my name is Mary Smith I'm 24 have you ever taken an acting class not really I couldn't afford it but I watch a lot of films and I learned so much by watching them they also cited a 2000 book by Robert Spade Oni called uncanny bodies uncanny bodies posits the shift from silent to sound film was jarring to audiences and both unintentionally added to the horror of those films and influenced film from then on I haven't read the book but I have read the essays Bodoni published first titled the uncanny body of early sound film in this essay he quoted James O Spearing who in 1928 said when orchestral accompaniment and the noises of such things as steam engines horses hoofs gunfire and alike were synchronized with pictures nobody became alarmed they were in addition that's all but when screen actors began to speak lines the silent drama was attacked voices invaded its peculiar domain sped only described quote the viewers renewed awareness of the mechanical nature of the cinema stemming from issues from the period of transition between silent and sound and also the initial sensational novelty appeal of synchronized sound film speed Oni referred to this as medium sensitivity on top of a general heightened awareness brought on by the novelty of a massive technological shift were issues like synchronization problems similar to the heavy rain example in video games unintentional sync issues made characters dip into the uncanny valley both by reminding viewers of their unreality and distance from an actual present physical person such as an actual actor onstage rather than a projected one on a flat screen and by mismatching sound and movement movement again being important to Moore his essay even will synced early sound recordings sounded eerie and artificial gol-do both to limited technology and audiences having trouble taking in sound that came from a centralized place rather than directly from the on-screen characters mouth something we today no longer struggle with as spectators he said synchronized speech could be exhilarating arresting Liso and also by virtue of its newness had the power to make viewers uncomfortable and that sound recent citize viewers to the visual image he quoted a review of the jazz singer from 1930 saying that the need for actors to stay close to hidden microphones keep still and enunciate clearly made the players resemble figures in a wax museum he speaks of imperfect sound technology that many believed was never more imperfect than when it was reproducing the human voice sped own accord others describing characters and early sound films as ghostly and spooky as film quote took what was widely perceived to be a major step towards a full of representation of reality it simultaneously became more unreal evoking a resemblance to a living human corpse he suggested that universals Dracula and Frankenstein benefited from the uncanny nature of early sound film saying the pioneers at Universal were filmmakers but they were also film viewers their experiences as such might have influenced the choices they made as they brought two semi life those first undead creatures of the sound era it's cool that wax figures and corpses were brought up in relation to films from the 1920s in the 1930s being that they're both again central tomorrow's sa just in general I'm not gonna go super into detail with regard to the 2012 translation of Morrie's original essay since the basic concept is so well known and the essay is so short and accessible I'll of course link it in the description but it's easy to Google and it's only a few pages long and it's really easy to read and understand the key points to take from his essay are the basic graph the graph including movement in the fact that he recommends designers aimed for the first peek rather than attempting the second and failing I would propose to additions to his theory as it stands one the uncanny valley can elicit feelings other than fear and two it does not apply only to that which is almost human regarding this spectrum of inhuman and unrealistic versus human I've seen a juxtaposition of the two played up as a game in anime and manga lucky today japan has a character named Brad KITT and obvious homage to Brad Pitt whose strikingly realistic features are comically out of place among more stylized faces what does he keep stored and in great teacher onizuka the main character's reaction shots are rendered in a grotesque realistic style in contrast to his normally more stylized appearance Cromartie high school has a fairly realistic art style but it's a comedy the contrast between absurd situations and more realistic faces is plain it for laughs one punch man's art style while not photorealistic is detailed and carefully rendered but for some reaction shots the main character regresses to an oval face for comedic effect the uncanny valley is built to describe something almost human but not human enough and proposed explanations tend to focus on the human aspect of the theory on my second point the computer animation and special effects section of the wiki page for the uncanny valley mentions Susannah polos review of the live-action Avatar movie where a file looks creepy because quote prey animals leg bison have eyes on the sides of their heads so moving them to the front without changing the rest of the facial structure tips us right into the uncanny valley bad taxidermy is unsettling and uncomfortable and precisely the same way faux humans that fall into the uncanny valley are it's hardly a leap to compare a poorly constructed taxidermy rendering of an animal to a creepy animatronic non-person Kelly Turnbull talked about this on the page with the toaster comic it reads if you want something non-human to a moat like a human you can't just slap human eyes on it and call it a day back in the day sometime in first year animation class we were doing four legged animal walk cycles of animals randomly chosen out of a hat the teacher warned us that people who got things like cats and dogs were probably going to have a harder time than people who got things like bears and raccoons because people are so familiar with those animals that they'll always notice right away if something looks wrong this goes for anything people have a point of reference for I would assume that furry art wouldn't be quite as popular as it is if the cute cartoon girls were replaced with realistic human animal mashups at least Turnbull is talking generally about humans and human animal combinations but it works when applied to representations of animals especially as Turnbull says ones that we are familiar with for my parasocial essays I learned a lot about Paro the robotic therapy seal Paro is cute cartoonish unrealistic and based on an animal most people wouldn't have seen or held in person cheaper animatronic therapy animals modeled after animals humans are more familiar with like cats and dogs register more complaints about them being creepy in robotic one review for a therapeutic robot cat on Amazon says simply I returned it and I am still waiting for my refund the cat was very scary I also have a fascination with what are called stealth sites a cell tower is also known as a cell site and cell sites that are disguised as something other than cell sites are called stealth sites I find them weird and creepy and funny to me they look like aliens try to design a tree that blended in with the rest of the landscape and failed completely others are also sensitive to this uncanny weirdness stealth sites have about them the conspiracy tree tower is a short piece about a stealth site that elicited fear and paranoia and Infowars types a blog post by a Georgia resident written in 2011 entitled that's no tree that's a cell tower states that originally conceived as an attempt to make telecommunications towers more compatible with their surrounding environments these structures have become integrated in the popular culture because the tree towers create more of a visual impact than ordinary tower structures it mentions a band called Franken pine and says that a designer of one of these sites said what we try to do the best we can is to blend in one person the blogger spoke to said it's quite cool that they disguise it as a tree and it stands out it's not very attractive the unease I feel when looking at an uncanny valley object is often coupled with humor it's a juxtaposition of feelings in sort of the same way as saying something is both quite cool and not very attractive faulty animatronics and bad taxidermy are often played for laughs with a similar juxtaposition to the one I mentioned being mind in anime and a local park Association president interviewed by the vlogger described how she and her husband laughed about the fake tree stealth site for some reason that is difficult to articulate even as a huge animal lover I find taxidermy animals attached to drones hysterical many others have a less positive response and find them disrespectful and offensive think they should look rest in peace that's crazy which is of course completely understandable by limiting the emotion study to fear or unease and limiting the subjects to objects that are human-like we limit ourselves in the exploration of this concept I admit this is getting outside of Morrie's intended purview somewhat but when research is limited to one aspect of a phenomenon as justification for the phenomenon there are bound to be missing pieces in fact one of my favorite pieces of horror theory null Carol's ideas about the liminal which I referenced in my Hannibal essay and which boiled down to that which violates cultural boundaries is often treated with reactionary disgust definitely apply here and are a topic that I plan to devote a future horror Theory video essay to many explanations for the uncanny valley hinge on why we find an almost human eerie just from the wiki page mate selection mortality salience pathogen avoidance I even found a study that linked uncanny feelings with perceptions of virtual characters that had poorly animated facial expressions because to the players they read as psychopaths but while these are all certainly valid ideas that amplify the sense of weariness felt when confronted with an almost human the focus should be on finding almost anything we are familiar with scary with humans just happening to be what we are most familiar with I'm not the only person who has taken issue with Morys essay dude Hansen Andrew Olney is smart a Pereira and Marge Zilka published up ending the uncanny valley in 2005 their piece is the one I've seen most referenced as a counter-argument to the theory rigorous examination of any theory is of course both admirable and necessary but I don't buy most of their ideas or comparisons they bring up Greek sculpture and/or dance thinker and Mary Cassatt's baby paintings as examples of accepted great and important works but I'd argue that sculptures don't fit more ease definition of the valley especially since they are absent any movement and even though there's still these baby paintings are in fact kind of creepy they also claim that they're philip k dick robot contradicts the uncanny valley but while looking for video of their supposedly revolutionary android one of the first things that popped up was a u2 video titled freaky AI robot other uploads on YouTube had comments like laugh while you can this makes me so uncomfortable evil version of Jarvis its eyes they just don't look right why would you connect that [ __ ] to the Internet they left it his answers he'll laugh at their funerals y'all laugh now but you'll regret missing the warning signs in your people pins and I don't think so one of the videos uploaded has this description this is a video of me at next fest in Chicago 2005 talking to philip k dick Android he did not want to stop looking at me or talking to me and I just read on the internet that someone has stolen him what if he escaped and is coming to get me some people thought it was funny rather than creepy are felt a combination of the two the same way I describe my own reactions to uncanny valley objects either way for a lot of spectators it was a failed representation of a human being and it elicits revulsion and fear derision or both compare this to YouTube videos featuring therapy silver robot Paro who has a much more favorable reaction with most people calling it cute or adorable I agree though with their assertion that there is little to lose by making robots uncanny and much to gain in our understanding of humans and human emulation and that realistic robots are enticing simply as an under explored territory in robotics the piece contains admirable effort towards reaching a comfortable level of realism and robots rather than conceding to an insurmountable valley I also like the assertion that anthropomorphic depictions can be disturbing or appealing at every level of abstraction our realism people simply get more sensitive with increasing levels of realism this reminded me of much of what spud Oni said about film technology that the discursive element that was new raised awareness of the remaining silences and blank spots of the total sensory package and the perceptions that could result had the power to infiltrate and counteract viewers sense of the general advancement of the medium toward greater realism and that conflicting perceptual cues clashed in the minds of viewers who are trying to make sense of a new representational technology this seems to apply just as well to early sound film as it applies to robots from now into the future with the connecting thread being technological advancement of representations about humans move and speak it's not that out there to assume that as become culturally acclimated to new almost but not quite humans way we did with speaking humans on-screen will find them less creepy thoughtful insight and admirable effort don't make their philip k dick android any less creepy though and their evidence is not compelling enough this spectrum that they provide as a supposed takedown of the theory is not nearly as representative of the uncanny valley as Turnbull's Toaster spectrum despite the fact that these are serious robotics researchers in turn bol is a storyboard and webcomic artist carl McDorman one of the people who worked on the 2012 translation who i mentioned earlier has also worked on a ton of research on the uncanny valley why are we so sensitive to flaws in human-like forms well there are a number of possible theories for explaining this one is based on expectation violation the violation of human norms near human forms elicits our model of a human other but the models predictions mismatch the stimuli it doesn't measure up so for example we could have a kind of cross modal mismatch when you see a hand that looks like a real hand but you touch it and it feels cold and clammy it feels hard and mechanical you could have temporal mismatches for example the Android may produce very fluid movements and suddenly it jerks you have some kind of give or feedback in the system there's also issues of contingency it may have a very naturally but ask you a question it takes too long to give a response when you speak back to it that seems unnatural so this is another way of violating human norms another issue about androids is that they're very strange we didn't grow up or evolve in a world that had androids that had these objects that are actually electromechanical but look like human beings so they're on a kind of category boundary it's in this liminal area between human and machines and because they look like us they could call our personal identity into questions if they're really effective at imitating people then it could make us wonder well aren't we all just machines does that leave space for the soul for exam he has more than 20 papers listed on his website under that category I haven't read or sort of through all of them but of particular interest is the uncanny advantage of using androids in cognitive and social science research a paper he published with Hiroshi Ishiguro Ishiguro is a robot assist who designed an Android named Geminoid after himself and has more than once gotten plastic surgery to look more like Geminoid there are two spectrums presented in this essay the images quote morph from a mechanical looking humanoid on the left to an Android in the center to a human being on the right and chart human likeness familiarity and eeriness they're a more rigorous and intellectually honest representation of Morrie's theories in the other study and their findings support his hypothesis not every study of McDormand replicates the valley though for instance another one suggests that human likeness is only one of perhaps many factors influencing the extent to which a robot is perceived as being strange familiar or eerie a study he did with Steven O Antasari on how individual differences such as religious belief gender personality etc influence sensitivity to the uncanny valley suggests that the uncanny valley phenomenon may operate through both sociological constructs and biological adaptations for threat avoidance such as the fear and disgust systems my conclusion after researching and just generally as a human who feels something between knee jerk suspicion towards that which would fall into the uncanny valley and knee jerk derision towards it is that the uncanny valley is only one aspect of our distrust of that which we perceive as not necessarily just interstitial as in between two established states the states here being human and not human but both interstitial and attempting to be something we are very familiar with but just falling short as a threat it just so happens that human beings are faces how we move how we speak or what we're familiar with above all else and Maury himself in the original essay recounts discussed at a prosthetic hand as with any culturally or even instinctually ingrain disgust or fear reaction it's valuable for us to accurately and objectively assess it and how it affects us so that it does not lead to bigotry or fear there's nothing wrong with feeling freaked out over an Android our CGI character but there's obvious harm in dismissing other human beings because they don't fit an idealized standard of what we see as human whether it's because of illness or disability or whatever else remember that zipper ik and McDonnell deliberately used an ill avatar for the creepy one even though Mori placed an ill person fairly high up on his Valley this line also reminds me of Hayao Miyazaki and all my f our intention why not using melons you some highlights in the countenance the quinoa but they're too tall so no go home with us tonight no milk or Danis Krista Tommy Turkish m1g tonight I don't wanna get resolved haven't you guys women management you are a memory attending activated a vocal agility so strong I tell them one thing committed Monica say man typhoon with Yoko Hannibal I would hate to be someone with the top-of-the-line prosthetic hand that increase my quality of life and obviously pose no threat whatsoever to the people around me only to sit down and read more ease description of how my hand would make healthy people feel uneasy and how a woman would assuredly shriek if she touched it in a dark room when asked about whether people should reach beyond the valley Mori says I always tell them to stop there why do you have to take the risk and try to get closer to the other side it's not even interesting to develop a robot that looks exactly like a human from my perspective and I have no motivation to build a robot that resides on the other side of the valley I think the design of s mo is more invigorating I feel that robots should be different from human beings oddly enough in this same interview he says that the uncanny valley first started to receive attention outside of Japan at the OEE robotics and automation Society International Conference on humanoid robots in 2005 Mori was not able to attend that event this interview links to what seems to be a statement written by Mori in lieu of his attendance here's part of the statement here I make two brief comments on this subject from my present point of view to make up for my absence one a dead person's face may indeed be uncanny it loses color and animation with no blinking however according to my experience sometimes it gives us some more comfortable expression than the one given by a living person space dead persons are free from the troubles of life and I think this is the reason why their faces look so calm and peaceful in Armagh there is always an antenna complex that if you take one thing you will lose the other such a conflict appears on one space as troubles and makes his or her expression less comfortable when a person dies he or she is released from this antimony and has a quiet expression if so then where should we position this on the curve of the uncanny valley this is an issue of my current interest to once I position human beings on the highest point of the curve and the right hand side of the uncanny valley recently however I came to think that there is something more attractive and amiable than human beings and the further right hand side of the valley it is the face of a buddhist statue as the artistic expression of the human ideal he gives some examples and then he says those faces are full of elegance beyond the worries of life and have an aura of dignity I think those are the very things that should be positioned on the highest point of the curve while I introduced the notion of the uncanny valley I have not examined it closely so far I hope the above-mentioned two respects will help the further research of the uncanny valley in the 2012 interview as well when asked directly about projects aiming beyond the valley he says I wouldn't say that there are many but yes there are some and that's fine although I do think it's difficult using the wood carving of a Buddhist statue as an example that one last touch of the knife may destroy the whole thing there is a narrow margin for error especially because I'm only able to read sources in English not Japanese and because of my lack of familiarity with Buddhism which so much of Morrie's life outlook and for the research is tied to it's difficult to track the fluctuations and moroz beliefs around the uncanny valley but I wanted to present as much as I could of his ideas outside of the 1970s a his ruminations on the peace and beauty of a dead body suggests at least somewhat of an increased capacity for affinity for that which is outside of cultural norms and his reverence for what lies beyond the second peak and dismissal of that which is trying to replicate humans runs counter to what many roboticists are still desperately striving for there is a ton of research I haven't covered and I admit that I probably have some blind spots unlike film theory which I've studied for years I'm not exactly an expert when it comes to robotics and most of what I talk about here regardless of how important it is in the evolution of the thing is several years old and could be outdated feel free to suggest counter arguments and further research I would like to one day do an expanded essay on the uncanny outside of human representation robotics and Maurice general definition as well check out the upcoming part two of my parasocial relationship series where among a bunch of other stuff I'm gonna talk about different robots and their relationships with humans most of the ones that humans forge relationships with aren't very uncanny as it turns out if you'd like to hear me talk about null Carol and interstitial T in more detail check out my Hannibal essay and check out whatever I say I'll eventually devote entirely to the concept if you have some spare money please consider donating to my patreon it's support on patreon that gives me the time to do research for essays like this one thanks for watching

Channel: StrucciMovies

Views: 53,701

Rating: 4.9604249 out of 5

Keywords: shannon strucci, the uncanny valley, telenoid, anime, cromartie, hiroshi ishiguro, masahiro mori, kevin macdorman

Id: qv47dL-qbXk

Length: 34min 30sec (2070 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 30 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Lion_taster]

I almost dismissed it because I was already decently familiar with the topic, but this is one of the best videos I’ve seen on the Uncanny Valley

[u/voidmountain]

I could watch this over and over ... it’s just such a well constructed video!