Uncanny Valley in Star Wars

The above graph shows graphically the uncanny valley hypothesis, which has its roots in Freud, Jentsch and a Japanese roboticist named Masahiro Mori. The concept of the uncanny was a Freudian idea in which something was simultaneously familiar and repulsive, but in the early 20th century, I'm sure it was limited to fairly abstract things found in dreams or literature. By the late 20th century, with technological advances in robots and animation, as well as the growing popularity of science fiction, we began moving further up the "uncanny valley" curve, but still on the positive slope. With the real breakthroughs in animation in the late 1990s and 21st century, it seems like we plummeted. I remember first feeling something weird when seeing a trailer for a movie based on a popular video game. The animation artists had gotten a realistic animated human being, but it was very uncanny in the Freudian sense - I felt a little grossed out. I especially felt it when I saw The Polar Express, and it was with that movie's release that I started to see a ton about the "uncanny valley hypothesis." Without further ado, I present to you a 1 minute explanation of the hypothesis from 30 Rock (ht to jk). Very funny.

Seriously, though, I think our comic book artists and science fiction writers seriously underestimated the degree to which this is really a problem. What's really bizarre is that most likely, older science fiction movies which had primitive technology probably could represent transhumanoids in a way that was aesthetically superior, simply because they couldn't get so close to accuracy as to actually fall into the valley. Furthermore, you know how everyone always criticizes Barbie because her dimensions are so horrible? For instance, I think if she were proportional, then Barbie would be some kind of giant woman with huge boobs. But, what if it the reason children can play with Barbie is because of the uncanny valley hypothesis? That is, in order for the doll to even be playable, it must be to the left of the valley, which necessarily means distorting the image. Sort of flips the idea that we're giving false body image to our children when you think about that.



Update: At the end of the wikipedia article, they note several roboticists who say the hypothesis is pseudoscientific. I don't see how it could be "pseudoscientific", but it's entirely possible that we've falsified the hypothesis. But it's obviously scientific in the sense that it has testable predictions. We need only to agree upon (for example) a sequence of robots the move closer and closer to human likeness, show them to a random sample of people, and try to test their reactions against some control group. If they experience some significant increase in "repulsion," however we measure it, then we've been unable to reject the hypothesis of "no effect," so to speak. So in my mind, it does seem scientific. But what I suspect they mean is that the evidence for the phenomenon's existence is maybe weak. I've not seen any psychologists study it, so who knows, but apparently the film industry takes it seriously because of negative audience reaction to an old Pixar short that had an animated baby.