Uncanny Valleygirl

Just wanted to post briefly about a new project I started this weekend, Uncanny Valley Girl: an exploration of the uncanny valley via Hannah Montana fanart I found on the internet.

The uncanny valley hypothesis holds that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The name captures the idea that a facsimile which is "almost human" will seem overly "strange" to a human being and thus will fail to evoke the empathic response required for productive human-robot interaction [Wikipedia].

Here is an article about it from the late, great Damn Interesting. Some YouTube examples of robots that might evoke the response are here, here, and especially here and here.

--Ryan