_Uncanny Valley_ is a term used to describe negative reactions to any artificial human form that approaches the realistic. Doctor Masahiro Mori described The Uncanny Vally Effect as a result of testing:
“…people’s emotional responses to a wide variety of robots, from non-humanoid to completely humanoid. He found that the human tendency to empathize with machines increases as the robot becomes more human. But at a certain point, when the robot becomes too human, the emotional sympathy abruptly ceases, and revulsion takes its place. People began to notice not the charmingly human characteristics of the robot but the creepy zombielike differences”.
The Uncanny Valley Effect continues beyond mechanically-produced humanoid representations to the synthetic. In 2005, Mori revised his theory by adding a category that includes an artistic expression of human modelling and “something more attractive and amiable than human beings”.
In synthetic environments, humanesque avatar adoption illustrates just how the Uncanny Valley Effect diffuses in line with Mori’s revised principle. In-world participants [both game oriented and otherwise] display comprehensive identity projection in order to achieve workable immersion. This projection promotes the adoption of synthetic character “skins” as extensions of consciousness, rather than presenting as externalised automatons. Players then view their avatars as an Ego [in the Freudian sense] elongation as opposed to a humanoid mirror.
Humanoid avatars may also fall into an _ultrahuman_ perceptual category as shown through the example of _Emily_:
Emily operates as an amalgam of a geophysical and synthetically rendered entity: her face is mapped to that of her human counterpart, a live actor also named Emily. The resulting augmentation accelerates beyond the Uncanny Valley dip [as seen in the graph above] via minuscule asymmetries that aren’t scaled high enough to break the beauty-symmetry barrier. Her face is unlined, unmarked, yet still convincing as a heightened variation of a “real” actor. Emily embodies the concept of the digitized _Übermensch_; an iconic mix of synthetic + geopresenced perfection.
Could the technology used to produce Emily extend to the creation of augmented identity “sets” where tailor-made avatars are worn according to contexts/moods? Could the future of the cosmetics industry involve the mass production of illusionary facial constructs applied as easily as make-up [think: a mixture of a holographic caul and synthetic rendering]?
Your reading of Emily reminds me of the android Annalee Call (an avatar authored by Winona Ryder) in Alien Resurrection. I did some digging around but couldn’t find the specific quote – at one point in the movie she is reamed out for being “more human than a human”, an overly successful simulation.
ANGLE: CALL’S CHEST
Wren has indeed made a messy hole here, but where blood and bone should be there is a tangle of synthorganic wiring. To state the obvious:
A robot.
JOHNER
Call’s a goddam synthetic!
HILLARD
Son of a bitch. Little Annalee’s just full of surprises.
RIPLEY (quietly)
I should have known.
ST JUST
Couldn’t smell this one out?
RIPLEY
No, I mean… all that crap about being human – there’s no one so
zealous as a Born Again.
VRIESS (to Call)
You’re an LM7, aren’t you? Is that it?
CALL
Leave me alone.
Her voice shocks her more than anyone her vocal track slip affected by
the wounds.
The voice is a shade slow, and echoes strangely.
VRIESS
Call ….
CALL (bitterly)
Yes.
ST JUST
LM7? Shit. That explains a lot.
YRIESS (to Ripley)
The latest and best. They were supposed to revitalize the synthetic
industy.
Instead they buried it.
Ripley looks at the girl.
RIPLEY
They were-too good.
VRIESS
Oh yeah. Overrode their own behavioral inhibitors. Didn’t feel like
being told what to do.
The government ordered a recall. Fucking massacre.
HILLARD
1 always heard there were a few that got out alive, but man… I never
thought I’d see one.
Johner starts laughing.
JOHNER
Oh, Christ. Doing fucking nickel and dime border runs, selling second
hand junk to the farm belt… and we’re carrying the most expensive
piece of contraband in the system.
That’s rich.
PURVIS (getting anxious)
It’s great, she’s a toaster oven… Can we leave now?
–
hmm this is from an early script draft:
http://www.scifiscripts.com/scripts/alienresurrection_early.txt
i’m sure there’s a line in finished script, uttered by Johner, that alludes to Call’s generalised empathy being “more human than human”. + now i have _white zombie_’s song in my head [brilliant track: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXpbrGBIGxw ]
Hi,
We thought you and your visitors might be interested to hear about a new Alternate Reality Game that we’re putting together.
“Traces of Hope” is being launched as the first ever charity online ARG and is being built by the British Red Cross to coincide with its Civilians and Conflict month. The game features Joseph a sixteen-years-old caught up in the Ugandan civil war, separated from his family, hungry and alone in a camp overflowing with thousands forced to flee, Joseph is desperately seeking his mother. But he needs your help…
Registration will open on Sunday 28th but until then there’s a teaser page at http://www.tracesofhope.com and a teaser video at http://www.vimeo.com/1811645
We’d really appreciate a link to the game or any coverage you could provide. Any questions please let me know,
Thanks
Alex
[...] for entertainment, for now. The Vicon system is not the latest motion capture technology, such as markerless motion capture or 3D cameras, but it is a robust and reliable technology, still used widely in the gaming and [...]
[...] for entertainment, for now. The Vicon system is not the latest motion capture technology, such as markerless motion capture or 3D cameras, but it is a robust and reliable technology, still used widely in the gaming and [...]