Uncanny valley is a psychological phenomenon, which means that it can't be proved and comes from unknown discomfort. Also known as the valley of fear and confusion.

The Theory of Horror Valley (also known as Weird Valley, English: Uncanny Valley；; Japanese: Bouvier phenomenon) is a hypothesis about human feelings for robots and non-human objects. It was put forward by Japanese robot expert Sen Zheng Hong in 1970, but the word "uncanny valley" was put forward by Ernst Janchi in his paper "uncanny valley Psychology" in 1906, and his viewpoint was expounded by Freud in his paper "uncanny valley" in 19 19.

Sen Zheng Hong's hypothesis points out that because robots are similar to humans in appearance and action, humans will also have positive feelings for robots; Until a certain extent, their reaction will suddenly become extremely negative. Even if robots are only a little different from humans, they will be very conspicuous and dazzling. The whole robot looks very stiff and scary, which makes people feel like facing a zombie. However, when the similarity between robots and human beings is rising, which is equivalent to the similarity between ordinary people, human emotional response to them will return to positive again, thus producing empathy among human beings.

The word "uncanny valley" is used to describe the rejection of robots that are similar to themselves. "Valley" refers to the relationship between "goodwill and similarity" in the study. Before the similarity is close to 100%, the goodwill suddenly drops to the level of disgust and rises to the interval before the goodwill.

Japan's reply? Q2 robot, some people are disgusted and afraid of it.

Uncanny valley phenomenon can be explained by the following ideas: If an entity is "not anthropomorphic enough", then its anthropomorphic characteristics will be conspicuous and easy to identify, thus generating empathy. On the other hand, if an entity is "anthropomorphic enough", its non-anthropomorphic characteristics will become a conspicuous part, creating a strange feeling in the eyes of human observers.

Another possibility is that patients and corpses have many visual deformities similar to some humanoid robots, which leads to the same panic and emotional reaction of observers. This reaction is worse on robots than on corpses, because people can easily understand why they are disgusted with corpses, but they can't clearly understand why they are so disgusted with robots. Behavioral deformities include behavioral characteristics, neurological status and even mental dysfunction of diseases, which cause serious negative emotions of observers.

This phenomenon can also be explained by the theory of evolutionary psychology. First of all, the entities in uncanny valley are anthropomorphic enough to be regarded as a member of the human species. According to the theory of evolutionary psychology, after millions of years of natural selection, there is a logical deviation in the existing human brain that has not been eliminated naturally, which provides a high ability to perceive and reject those human deformities that reflect hereditary diseases or lack of health. Therefore, consciously or unconsciously, the potential influence of those abnormal humanoid individuals in the human gene pool will also arouse the vigilance of observers. This explains why humans usually don't find human-like entities that can have sexual contact attractive.

Some robotics experts strongly criticize this theory, arguing that Sen Zheng Hong has no basis on the right side of the chart, because humanoid robots have only been technically feasible in recent years. David Hanson, a robot expert, once copied his girlfriend's head and thought that the theory of the valley of terror was "pseudoscience, but it was regarded as real science". Sara Kiesler, an expert in human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University, once questioned this theory, arguing that although there is evidence to support it, there is also evidence against it.

Even though the general experimental results and applications are limited to robots, uncanny valley's principle can even be extended to the role of computer animation. Roger ebert, an American film critic, once applied the concept of uncanny valley to the makeup and clothing of human characters in movies, especially Tomb of Fireflies.

Some people think that uncanny valley is the difficulty in making computer animation. Many film critics on computer animation cite uncanny valley as the reason why they don't like a movie. This theory leads to that if people want to increase their goodwill towards an object, they should try to add less humanized features to the appearance of cartoon characters so as not to fall into the "horror valley trap".

The example of uncanny valley in the film can be found in the little tin soldier of Pixar. In the movie, the baby's face is all drawn by computer, which is not much different from human beings, but it causes children's fear and disgust. Two-dimensional images weaken the effect of uncanny valley, but the baby's facial details still make the characters look evil and sophisticated. Woody in Toy Story is also considered as an example of uncanny valley.

In wreck-it ralph, a three-dimensional computer cartoon produced by Disney Company, "The role of' Turbine' has become a successful example of uncanny valley's application in portraying villains.

Scott mcleod, a writer, put forward another version of the horror valley theory in his understanding comics. He pointed out that some simple cartoon characters can reserve imagination space for readers and enhance their sense of identity, such as Brother Yolk. Therefore, a simple cartoon character can make readers substitute for self-cognition; On the contrary, if the structure of cartoon characters becomes more and more complex, even close to the picture, people will feel far away from their own "he" and have difficulty in cognition. The animation "Evil China" is an example.

Mcleod is mainly engaged in figurative art, such as video games, comics and animation, instead of exploring human-like entities in the real world like Sen Zheng Hong. A short essay by Sen Zheng Hong also mentioned the horror valley theory in works of art: he proposed that the artistic idealization of human patterns would make people feel better than the real face (taking the traditional Buddha's expression as an example).

With the development of game consoles and personal computers, uncanny valley phenomenon in electronic games will become more and more common, especially in the "next generation" hardware.

NVIDIA and ATI (now AMD), manufacturers of graphics processors, made technical demonstration samples to depict more realistic human characteristics [1].

In the past E3 Electronic Entertainment Exhibition, Sony showed some pre-sale hardware with pictures of entering uncanny valley. In 2000, Sony presented a real old man's face with emotion engine of PlayStation 2. In 2005, Sony showed the facial expression changes of the movie star Alfred Monlina under the scattering of real light. In 2006, Electronic Arts of the United States showed Tiger Woods' head with a brand-new facial expression capture technology, which she called playable universal capture (or UCAP[2] for short) in the market. Another exhibit comes from the pre-sale "Heavy Rain". The film shows a woman listening to a part of the game.