Needs Help: Uncanny Valley.Real Life

Yeah, I thought I'd better come here instead of arbitrarily chopping it. This section has four folders, full of natter and sometimes unsupported weblinks.

Does it need chopping?

Everything that's about real people should be chopped. Exceptions could be made for photoshops made for purpose of creepy.

It's just bad taste, and most of the time it doesn't really fit anyway.

edited 24th Mar '12 2:20:23 PM by Feather7603

The Dolls, Robots, and "Other" sections seem pretty good to me. The People section is totally silly, and barely has anything to do with the Uncanny Valley.

The plastic surgery examples might count.

edited 24th Mar '12 2:33:54 PM by abk0100

Dolls section

* This. Now, most of the lifelike dolls the company offers are adorable. But that... there is just something off about the likeness. It's not a newborn human baby—it's the spawn of the Uncanny Valley.

• Bunraku puppets dance in and out of the valley. What's frightening is that they don't move like any other sort of puppet, they move exactly like little tiny people.
  • Which is why the traditional "Uncanny Valley" graph shows them being outside of the valley but on the human side, which makes this troper wonder, if they added some more realistic touches to things currently IN the valley, would they be lifted out like Bunraku puppets?
    • Which is also why they usually perform bunraku shows some distance away from the audience◊.
• Real Dolls (NSFW). Film technicians who have worked with Real Dolls for movies report that handling them is creepily like handling corpses. Obviously, they, their flawless sexiness and their eternal sexual submission is massive Fetish Fuel and/or an alternative to prostitution / free-willed women for some, thus enabling the uncanny valley to be ignored a bit.
  • Sankaku Complex appears a disturbing amount of times here.. Although, they seem like they hit the nail on the head with the title of this article.(NSFW) One of the comments was definitely on to something when they referred to it as being like "a very clean serial killer's slaughter house."
• Reborns. Baby dolls created to resemble the real thing as much as possible. Women also carry these things around and treat them like they're real babies. Yes, it combines babies, which are horrifying in themselves, and dolls, which are extremely horrifying in themselves. Warning: High Octane Nightmare Fuel.
• At the end of this video... just look at it.
• Wax museums.
  • Can be both terrifying and funny- this troper went to Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum, and there was a statue there of an average-looking young man dressed like one of the museum staff. People kept going up to it asking where the bathroom was.
  • This Troper knows someone who took her very young son to Madame Tussaud's. Apparently he couldn't figure out why everyone was ignoring him and his parents found it hilarious.

Natter, this troper, Weblinks Are Not Examples and a very nasty NSFW link.

Robots:

* John Nolans animatronics https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=HyNh3AXegxw#t=20s

• Cracked has a list of some real-world androids that dwell in the darkest depths of the Uncanny Valley. They even mention the trope by name. In a similar vein - 5 Real Robots Built to Love you to Death. The final example is completely deliberate and was built to study the Uncanny Valley effect.
• Lo and behold, it's HRP-4C. Say hi to her. Preferably with a rocket launcher.
• OH MY GODS.....this....unholy.....ELDRITCH ABOMINATION!! Merely describing it in words, English, Japanese, the language of R'lyeh or otherwise is not enough to speak of the utter wrongness of Hiroshi Ishiguro's robotic Frankensteinian creation, the Telenoid R1. It can be described and spoken of as possessing an amoeboid physique, unnatural movement, infantile appearance, dissonance of a perfectly human voice.... ugh! But to describe It with these characteristics is a mere superficiality. The actual horror and absurdity lies in the interaction, the fact that despite being unspeakable, the old man is still able to interact, speak and respond with the nightmare as if it were an actual human being. The stigmata might as well go farther into the abyssal subconscious depths of uncanninness and straight into those terrifying vistas and Things Man Was Not Meant to Know, where lie the Eldritch Abominations whom when encountered will leave us into paranoia and howling madness. As the geek website Topless Robot puts it, it's "A HORRIBLE LIMBLESS WHITE BLOB STRAIGHT OUT OF LOVECRAFT'S MEDULLA OBLONGATA."
  • Aww, he's cute! :D He looks like a fleshy armless mermaid!
    • ...Well, fuck.
• Kokoro, the new Actroid robot from Japan, illustrates this concept beautifully by also showing how robots may one day leave the Valley behind. While her blinking and frowning may be pretty off-putting right now for how inhuman they look, her general appearance and smile are so gentle and endearing that when she's doing those movements she actually climbs out of the Valley and looks just like a real woman.
  • The word Kokoro has many nuances, which can mean soul, emotion, heart, or spirit.
• While the Big Dogrobot doesn’t really resemble any living creature, it is the robot’s leg movements that seem a little unsettling (especially at around 1:12).
  • It looks like two footless humans walking head to head, that's probably what makes it unsettling.
  • It does look somewhat like that, yes.
    • I think I pegged it, its legs give a spider / insect vibe, most noticeable when its scrabbling around at 1:12, humans also have a built in fear reaction to alien/insectoid things.
    • Also: the whirring motors. It makes the thing sound like a bumblebee from hell.
  • A lot of commentators seem to liken it to some form of horrifyingly deformed animal in constant pain.
• The AFFETTO child robot could really use some work in the design.
• The Geminoid. ...o0. The most disturbing part is how perfect it is. It looks exactly like a real person right up until you realize OH MY GOD IT DOESN'T HAVE ANY ARMS OR LEGS AND IT'S PLUGGED INTO A DAMNED DESK!
• Human-like androids in general tend to be like this but the Japanese take it a step too far. It might have something to do with the fact that they have flawless skin, eyes larger than normal, and perfectly symmetrical faces, and since they're almost always female and tend to be made to look like an ideal woman, well....That leaves some unsettling implications...
• Three disembodied android faces singing "Freedom" in robotic voices. Sweet merciful mother. Excuse me while I go hide under my desk.

Natter, first person, really bad hyperbole.

The Other section just has more natter.

edited 24th Mar '12 2:31:15 PM by lu127

Of course there's natter, but the examples themselves mostly fit the trope. They should be cleaned up, not deleted.

Uh, no. Policy says that Real Life sections stay around as long as they aren't problematic.

Certainly, but this isn't regarding actual people. We could clean up the bits about dolls and robots and put a warning not to go overboard with natter and to keep it tasteful. Anything regarding real people ought to go, even the bits about plastic surgery.

I think the policy is "If a section makes problems, you won't get any trouble for killing it, but you can waste your time with cleanup if you want".

Also, pay attention if you are talking about real people, many people's thinking nonwithstanding you can be in the Uncanny Valley after e.g a facial injury and the like.

I attempted to clean up the "People" folder— removing natter and things that explicitly went against the trope definition— "I think this person looks creepy!"— but it's still a mess.

EDIT: By the way, do we have a policy on NFSW links? I searched, but couldn't find anything.

edited 24th Mar '12 2:59:37 PM by Webby

Yes. Killing them if they are strong ones or unnecessary, and even so I might be underestimating it.

I think we do allow some NSFW links. some.

No, no, no. This was discussed to death in wiki talk and NSFW links are immediately zapped, no questions asked.

I think that this topic should be brought back to Wiki Talk.

I don't know how to tell if something is stronger than usual or not because I don't really look at NSFW stuff.

Either way, I don't think anyone's gonna miss that link.

I saw a cracked link in there, those belong in Web Original.

Good catch. I moved it.

I'm thinking of adding a comment in the source— something like "Please read over the main page before adding an example, and make sure you know the criteria for the Uncanny Valley. It is more than 'this celebrity looks creepy/weird'."

Does that sound OK?

EDIT: Cleaned up some of the natter and hyperbole in the Robots folder.

edited 24th Mar '12 7:37:34 PM by Webby

Is it okay to remove all the People examples with plastic surgery? That leaves the intentional examples. I would be okay to leave in those who got maimed and got reconstructed faces. The first one might be sensitive, but the second was used in an ad, so I think it's not tasteless to have it here as well.

I'm confused my this example:

• In another non-human example, some recent paleoart may be seen as such, but towards dinosaurs and other creatures of prehistory. The work of Pixel Shack has often been criticized, especially those reconstructions that blend 2D and 3D imagery. The result is a wonky-looking dinosaur with obvious 2D skin patterns◊ layered on top of its otherwise 3 dimensional-looking body, with at times uncomfortably bent limbs◊, oversized heads◊, and a creepily derpy expressions◊. Still, they're leagues ahead of most vintage dino-pics of bygone years, like this fucking piece of fuck. But let's be fair: since we'll never perfectly know what most of these animals looked like, even the best reconstructions will have at least one detail way off. Being stuck deep in the Uncanny Valley is more of a rule, not an exception, in paleoart.

I must be blind. I can sort of see what it means about the limbs, but the "oversized head" is rather clearly because of perspective, and the "derpy expression" looks far too low-res to even really make out the expression...

I'd say remove.

Yeah, remove, but even if it were a proper example, it wouldn't be "real life." It would be art...

Even if that was an example, it would still be horribly written. "fucking piece of fuck"?

I'm not sure if plastic surgery examples count or not. I know they can look pretty darned inhuman.

I'm pretty sure that plastic surgery can create such a face, but how do we distinguish it from Accidental Nightmare Fuel?

The links to Sankaku complex should not be there. It's full of NSFW ads and our guidelines do not allow them.

We do allow toys as examples and the dolls are toys, sort of. Robots also seem on-mission, since they are creations in the same vein as toys.

Oh, it's not the examples that are problematic, it's the links. Sankaku complex has Danbooru level ads.