Nilesh's Weblog

The Uncanny Valley

If you have watched both Final Fantasy:TSW and Ghost In The Shell, which one of them would you prefer watching again? If you ask me, its the latter. Why, you ask? What is the relation between both? They have totally different stories. Well, it isn't about stories. Let's put it in a different way. Imagine you are in the year 2070 and you go to the mall to buy a robot. If you had the option of choosing between a perfectly realistic looking humanoid and C-3PO, who would you prefer to choose? Get the idea? No? In that case, let's quote from an article -

When an android, such as R2-D2 or C-3PO, barely looks human, we cut it a lot of slack. It seems cute. We don't care that it's only 50 percent humanlike. But when a robot becomes 99 percent lifelike — so close that it's almost real — we focus on the missing 1 percent. We notice the slightly slack skin, the absence of a truly human glitter in the eyes. The once-cute robot now looks like an animated corpse. Our warm feelings, which had been rising the more vivid the robot became, abruptly plunge downward. Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori called this plunge "The Uncanny Valley" the paradoxical point at which a simulation of life becomes so good it's bad.

This chasm — the uncanny valley of Doctor Mori's 1978 thesis — represents the point at which a person observing the creature or object in question sees something that is nearly human, but just enough off-kilter to seem eerie or disquieting. The first peak, moreover, is where that same individual would see something that is human enough to arouse some empathy, yet at the same time is clearly enough not human to avoid the sense of wrongness. The slope leading up to this first peak is a province of relative emotional detachment — affection, perhaps, but rarely more than that.

Interesting, because this is what has been disquieting in all realistic rendered films I have watched and the games I have played. I couldn't watch FF more than once inspite of the brilliant graphics and microscopic details. There is something eerie about a realistic looking face rendered in 3D.