Research Project: Artifact 3: Uncanny Valley

Why Am I doing it?
Gage audiences reactions and receptions of differing forms of animation and character appearances. The more stylized the more acceptable? Does hyper-realism and inconsistencies cause dislike and detachment.  

How am I doing it?
Controlled focused groups with a large variety of participants. Completion of video-clip experiment to gather and plot statistics

Results

 

When Uncanny valley is applied to special effects in movies, the implications are clear: if a filmmaker strives for high levels of realism in CGI characters, they risk taking the humanlike resemblance too far, causing viewers to notice mismatches in characters appearance and movement.

Our emotional response to photo-realistic characters is that of unease and repulsion, not pleasure or likeness. This can be seen in the plummet of the purple likeness curve to rise in the green realism curve on the graph, This concerns the near photo-realistic characters of Beowulf, polar express and Imagemetric's Emily

However If a filmmaker decides to create characters in a more stylized manner, clearly signaling that they are not supposed to appear “almost human,” (The Incredibles and Avatar) we are more likely to view these characters as likeable than the characters designed to look photo-realistic. We see evidence of this with Avatar and it's 8.5 peak of likeness just before the plummet into the Uncanny Valley

"The alien Na'vi were humanoid and extremely lifelike, but they were blue-skinned with other clearly non-human features, so they didn't trigger the uncanny valley effect"

My results seem to largely support the theories of Uncanny Valley. Adding more and more human features to artificially created characters (Hal - Avatar) seems to increase there likeness and familiarity, but only to a certain point (Emily), before becoming too perfect and plummeting into repulsion and the valley.

Interesting enough it appears that "The Adventures of Tintin" breaks the rules and climbs out of the uncanny valley, with an incredible high level of realism to likeness ratio. This could represent a huge advance in motion-capture capture technology where the Uncanny valley theory is no longer applicable. where audiences are no longer effected by the in perfections and trickery which has triggered the uncanny feelings of dislike in the past.