“…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”.
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]?
Biological science defines _synapses_ as neural units that primarily operate as a juncture between neurons. Synapses are viewed as conductors that are essential in determining functions in the central nervous system. Synaptic connections provide for transmission and production of information crucial to the survival of the relevant organism. Each synaptic connection operates via surges in a system dependent on constant electrochemical streaming. In Synthetic environments, a similar fluid process of content absorption and production, social data surging and information engagement is termed _Synthapticism_.
Synaptic performance is specific to a biological organism; in contrast, synthaptic functioning is specific to synthetic spaces and the entities that inhabit them. Synthetics engage synthaptically through a networked equivalent of geospatial orientation, biochemical triggering and geophysical body language. These equivalences are dependent on the platform[s] involved and levels of operational focus generated. This focus is represented by a concentrated mass of aggregational attention. An illustration of how this focused/concentrated attention manifests is the phenomena of _Crowdsourcing_. Crowdsourcers produceclusters of user-mediated data through surges of concentrated attention. MMOGs also utilize aggregational-generated information through the construction of guilds or collectives.
Synthetics display attentional surges appropriate to synthaptic shiftings. Synthetic environments operate in accordance with this surge potentiality, with users adopting platforms that offer a contemporary catering for the relevant surge. For instance, early adopters flock towards software that allows for adequate community transference. Synthapticism is evident in the transference of attention from one synthetic platform to another via this surging. Contemporary examples of such shifts are MMOGers uptake of the newly released _Age of Conan_ whilst abandoning their current game platforms, or Twitter users migrating to consistently usablemicro-blogging software.
Synthapticism produces unprecedented connections between synthetic participants. Adjunctive relationships are constructed via Identity interfacing and cushioned by support networks with a comparable emotional weighting to those found in traditional sociocentric structures [acquaintance>friendship>family>community]. Synthaptic communication may appear as fractured or trivial to those not connected synthaptically. One important component of the establishment of these synthaptically-defined relationships is the formation of appropriate semantic structuring. This will be discussed in _Unpacking the _Synthaptic_: Version 1.1_.
