Luisa Whitton
ON THE face of it, The Polar Express was a sure-fire winner: starring Tom Hanks, it told the charming story of a boy’s magical train journey to the North Pole. But when the movie came out in 2004, there was a problem: the ultra-realistic animation gave some viewers the creeps. Five years later, when James Cameron chose the same technology for Avatar, his graphics people reportedly thought the decision might bankrupt the production company. But Cameron’s blue humanoids went down a storm. For a while, Avatar was the highest-grossing film of all time.
You might have heard of the uncanny valley: the notion that the more human-like a non-human character becomes, the more we like it – until suddenly, we don’t. At some point where it is almost, but not quite, human we become unsettled, even revolted. The uncanny valley has been used to explain our adverse reactions to all sorts of almost-humans from zombies, androids and corpses to the creepy clowns recently terrorising North America. The characters in The Polar Express strayed into the valley. Cameron’s blue Na’vi did not. Why?
The Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori first described the uncanny valley in 1970. It has since become a highly influential idea that has shaped not only films and video games, but also robots, dolls and prosthetic limbs. But it has only recently been tested scientifically. The result? Researchers are divided on almost every aspect of it, from why we experience it to whether it actually exists. The uncanny valley, it seems, is weirder and more controversial than Mori could have predicted.
Mori’s original paper was a warning to roboticists not to stray too close to human…
