Example Drift: Uncanny Valley

How a robot acts is not personality.

Personality is a mental and emotional state. Robots don't have minds or emotions. Neither do CGI models. The problem wasn't with the character of the CGI people in stories like The Polar Express, the problem was with the way they looked and moved.

To stretch the trope to "personality" destroys the original point of the trope, which is that it's a technical barrier, not a characterization one. Someone does not just fall into the Uncanny Valley because they have an inhuman personality.

edited 21st Mar '11 6:31:50 AM by Scardoll

I'm solidly with scardoll here. The "or acted", if it even was in the original definition, didn't refer to personality, but to motion — look at the pirate at :26 here — there's something that's off about the way his hand moves. That's a case of "or acted" Uncanny Valley

Yep, the acting is referring to motion. There is not personality component to this trope and there shouldn't be. It's entirely about technical barriers.

Not gonna let this thread die.

Should we just clean the examples, or should we do anything to the description?

I think we should make an explicit note in the description that this term can't apply to human beings or personalities.

Of course it can apply to human beings, if they look slightly inhuman.

A human can't look inhuman. It is a human, and it clearly looks like itself. Therefore it looks like a human (namely, itself)!

By definition, a human can not fall inside the uncanny valley. They can be weird and creepy in other ways, but they aren't "an artificial creation that was made to mimic a human but fails in small ways giving it an eerie appearance."

The wikipedia article itself mentions a psychological theory that repulsion from ill people, old people, foreigners, can be explained with th Uncanny Valley, it is even speculated that some of these purposes caused the phenomena.

Causing the phenomena and being the phenomena aren't the same thing.

Cold causes hypothermia, but hypothermia is not the same thing as cold.

edited 25th Mar '11 10:24:50 AM by Ghilz

I think you're misreading the article. It doesn't say that any of those groups fall into the uncanny valley, just that the same neurological reflexes that allow us to recognize those groups are the reason we are able to classify certain things as not quite right.

The trope is about authors evoking the Uncanny Valley reaction for something abnormal, or failing to portray normal humans with CG, not about the literal psychological concept of "an artificial creation that was made to mimic a human but fails in small ways giving it an eerie appearance."

If the latter would be the case, even the most prominent examples, zombies, wouldn't be examples, as they are not artificial.

And if zombies can be examples, why couldn't a man suffering from leprosy be used to evoke the same reaction?

Because zombies aren't human. They're corpses mimicking life. Hand puppets that happen to be made out of human flesh. If you rip off a human's skin and stick it on top of a robot, it wouldn't be human. Zombies aren't human on the same principle. A sick living human is still a human.

Yes there is. A man suffering from leprosy is capable of far more human motions and appearance than a zombie, who is, ya know, dead.

edited 25th Mar '11 10:41:17 AM by Ghilz

That's depending on the type of zombie, and the severity of the leprosy.

But they aren't robots that's builders failed to make them look human.

So we are already using the original robotics concept as a metaphor, not the actual thing.

This page should be either about robots only, or about all eerily abnormal humanoids, but drawing an arbitary line at things that are not human according to the plot, is nonsense, not to mention, that it would take away focus from the fact that this is an appearance trope, not a plot type.

No, but they are things that aren't human, i.e. dead rotting bodies, that are given the semblance of being human. Making something out of a human doesn't make it human. That's my point.

Oi.

Sticking my head in as someone that's actually done 3d modeling, I'd favor a split. Keep Uncanny Valley for the observed, unintentional phenomenon with visual, realistic media (it may not even require examples) and make another trope along the lines of Something Not Quite Human for deliberate applications, be it art, writing, acting, etc, to show that there's something "off" about a character.

I do like the idea of the split. That would help sort out a lot of the trope's issues.

• Uncanny Valley would be strictly for CG and robots and other highly realistic designs that show the trope in their character designs. Things like Live Action humans would be excluded for being actually human and things like non-CG Anime would be excluded for being too stylized.

• Something Off From Human would be for behaviours in character that trigger a wrong response in the characters.

Edit: Not Quite Human appears to be an index. We'd need a better name for the second trope.

edited 25th Mar '11 11:07:18 AM by shimaspawn

I would do it the other way around as works that go for this for Androids and such call it this by name. And directly apply the theory in it's original context.

The bad/too good CG should get the other name.

edited 25th Mar '11 11:11:02 AM by Raso

Something Not Quite Right About Them, Uncannily Inhuman... I can go on. ;)

The original definition should get priority for the title Uncanny Valley. The other trope can acknowledge that relation without aping the name.

edited 25th Mar '11 11:15:32 AM by Elle

I would like a split, but both of the suggested titles are bad, it should still make it clear that this is an appearance trope, not about a status of humanity.

Slightly Off ?

Edit: those are also good.

edited 25th Mar '11 11:14:19 AM by EternalSeptember

Uncanny Valley should be the term as it's defined elsewhere. Works with androids use the name, but it gets into the issues that a lot of them misuse the name which winds up with no clear trope definition. Putting the term back to what it is everywhere else gives it a clear name.

I like Uncannily Inhuman for the in character reactions.

edited 25th Mar '11 11:17:21 AM by shimaspawn

I would be ok with only the intentional trope getting the Uncanny Valley name.

Maybe we should count some wicks to see which part is more commonly described with it.

Again, the original pre-existing term is specifically about robotics, even the "CG failure" interpretation is using it as a metaphor, as much as the live action or anime examples.

edited 25th Mar '11 11:20:00 AM by EternalSeptember

If we give it to the intentional version then we're just going to have trope decay of everyone giving it their own interpretations. I'd like to keep it as close to the original definition as possible. The standard technical definition of the term does include CG and not as a metaphor.

The original definition is ultimately defining an Audience Reaction. A very objectively observed and universal Audience Reaction but one nonetheless. What we're separating from it is knowledge of that reaction deliberarely applied as a trope.