The fricken point of the hypothesis is that the more realistic your robot looks, the more little details you have to get right in order to make people perceive it has human. The less realistic, the more you can get wrong. All the stuff you point out does not disprove the hypothesis, in fact, it shows that it is right.
Let me say this again: The Uncanny Valley Hypothesis only concerns itself with the influence of realism on the empathy felt by an observer. It does not matter that other things also influence the empathy felt by an observer. Obviously, a well-written story will make the observer feel more empathy, but that doesn't matter for this hypothesis. Why in the world are you incapable of understanding that?
And again, this is not a scientific theory. It's a hypothesis. Obviously you can't measure how human something is in percentages. That also does not matter! It's only a hypothesis. Somebody noticed that, as robots got more human-looking, it was suddenly harder to feel empathy for them as they reached a certain realism. I mean, it's not like you couldn't test this for yourself! I actually feel more empathy for my damn Roomba than for these ugly zombie-like realistic robots, and I feel more empathy for Mario than for the characters in a modern 3D adventure with realistic human characters.
Also, this is not about "everything being cartoony." Cartoony is good! If you read Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics," you'd know that he made a similar observation: It's easier for a reader to identify with a "cartoony" character than with a realistic character.
Finally, your own theory kind of shows that Uncanny Valley is correct. You yourself say that "The closer you get to realism, the harder it gets," which is exactly what the Uncanny Valley Hypothesis states, as well. Honestly, I don't understand why you keep arguing.
I have a similar case. I develop server-side Java apps that need to run on IE. So I have IntelliJ on my Mac, and lots of different Parallels images with IE6, IE7, Vista+IE7 and various other differences. At least one instance of Windows runs all day long next to my Mac.
Of course, if you intend to play games, BootCamp is still the better solution:-)
I'm a Mac user. Yes, I demand that developers do things differently on the Mac than on any other platform. If they don't, I don't care if they get tired of me, because I don't want their applications.
You don't just install crap all over my Mac. I want a single, simple bundle that I can install using drag-and-drop, and uninstall by dragging it to the Trash. If you absolutely need to install additional stuff, then:
use the standard Apple installer
tell me before installing what is going to be installed where
provide an option to only install stuff for the current user (if possible)
use the standard locations for stuff like Kernel Extensions
provide an easy way to uninstall all that stuff
If you don't do that, your application will flop on the Mac. If you create an application for the Mac, make it a Mac application and not just a Windows port.
First, yes, you're right, voice and writing and other factors play a role, but this is totally irrelevant as the hypothesis does not concern itself with voice and writing and other factors. It only looks at how realistic the character is rendered. I don't understand why you keep bringing up all these other points. Yes, they exist, but it is utterly nonsensical to try to disprove the Uncanny Valley by bringing up things that have nothing to do with the hypothesis. It's as if I said "people who drive faster get into worse accidents" and you replied with "you're wrong, because it also depends on whether they have airbags." It's true that it also depends on whether they have airbags, but that doesn't mean that what I stated was not true.
Second, the hypothesis talks about realistic rendering of humans. Gollum is not a realistic rendering of a human. It is a very unrealistic rendering of a human. It is a very realistic rendering of Gollum, but Gollum is no human. He's probably somewhere in the middle to middle-right of the "human likeness" axis, around the "stuffed animal" area. He's not supposed to look like a real human!
You're right, not everything that is uncanny is in the valley. Stuff on the left of the "human likeness" axis are also uncanny, because, as you say, it "isn't even close to presenting a human"!
The uncanny valley only comes into play when we are supposed to look at a character and interpret it as a realistic human. In those cases, we feel less empathy with a realistically rendered human than with a less realistically rendered human or with a less human looking character.
Yeah, I noticed that, too, and drew the same conclusions. I think in a way, both are a bit jealous of each other. Bill wants to have Steve's taste, and Steve wants to have Bills success.
I agree. When watching the interview, at first I thought "Why are they even doing that anymore? They are two of the richest men on this planet. They could do whatever the hell they want for the rest of their lives."
But the thing is, they are doing whatever the hell they want. Steve really seems to love beauty, style and taste. He loves crafting these beautiful objects. Bill loves futuristic, sci-fi technology. He loves the idea of turning every wall into a screen, or of having multitouch tables.
I doubt either of the two cares too much about market cap or market share - they have others to do that. I think they truly are doing what they love doing, which is creating amazing new products.
This is sad.
As a programming language, Javascript makes Visual Basic look good.
Why? What are your issues with JS (actually, ECMA Script, but let's stick with JS)? It's certainly not perfect, but I think most people simply don't like JS because they are not used to concepts like prototypical object orientation and duck typing, and are not willing to learn about it.
The main issue with JS is that different browsers have subtly different implementations. That's not a flaw inherent to JS, it's a flaw of the specific implementations.
I moved from NetNewsWire to Google Reader and from Mailsmith to gmail because it allows constant access to my data. No synchronization issues, no need for backups (well, less ned, I guess), and I can check my stuff at my friend's place, or in an Internet café during my holidays, or from my cell phone if there's no Internet anywhere. I wouldn't want to download and install apps there.
The difference is that we all have multiple computers now. We have a computer at work, one in the living room, one in the home office, we have a cell phone running Symbian or some other advanced OS, we have a Wii or a PS3, probably some kind of set-top box with Internet access... So you have your stuff shared across many different PCs, and you get synchronization issues. What if you want to read your personal mail at work? What if you're at a friend's place and want to quickly show him some holiday pictures on his Wii?
That's where the thin client comes in: If we store our data on one computer and use the other computers we have to access the data on that computer, we have solved this synchronization issue. The disadvantage is that now we need internet access to do all the things we used to do offline, which is where Gears (and many other recent "offline techs") come in.
FF: SW is a perfect example of how everyone looks dead. Advent Children and Gollum are perfect examples of how people can actually connect to and feel empathy for unrealistic renderings. Your example show that the Uncanny Valley hypothesis seems to be true.
I still think you're missing the point of the hypothesis. Read the wikipedia article.
First, the Uncanny Valley is a hypthesis. Second, it does not state that realistic renderings look weird. Instead, it states that humans show more and more empathy as models become more and more realistic, but that this rule breaks if we approach a perfect model, and humans suddenly look like zombies.
This can be easily observed. The unrealistic humans in "the incredibles" seem much more human than the children from "Polar Express," even though Polar Express uses a much more realistic rendering style.
What I wrote was obviously not a statistic. I did not mean "literally 80% of," I meant "a large part of." I think most humans are perfectly capable of understanding the meaning of my sentence.
We will not use parent's moronic post as a reason to insult all of you. We realize that a certain percentage of all people are morons. We realize that this applies to Windows users as well as to Mac users and Linux users. Even though not one single Apple story goes by without a PC user smugly declaring how idiotic Mac users and iPod owners are, we will not hold this against you since we assume that only a minority of all PC users consists of condescending Apple haters who presumably had a really hard childhood and now feel forced to take their anger out on Mac users.
PS: We would not mind if you lynched these idiots yourself, though.
However, Microsoft and Apple are influential, I'm struggling to figure out Linux's level of influence in determining the direction of personal computers and personal electronic devices.
I guess that's pretty much it. If Apple does something, the rest of the industry (and I don't just mean the computer industry) will follow a few months later. If Microsoft does something, 80% of all people will know about it or use it.
Wii Remote. Nothing beats playing games with your armes crossed.
360 Controller. Best all-around traditional gamepad.
Gamecube controller. Crappy d-pad, crappy z-trigger, but other than that, great controller and very comfortable. Love it that you can see which button to press from the shape displayed on screen.
Dreamcast. Looks like crap, but is really comfortable. Only the analog stick is a bit weird. VMU is awesome for games like Sonic Shuffe.
Hm... I like the N64 controller because it works great both for analog stick games, as well as for d-pad games.
Worst controller ever: Dual Shock/Sixaxis/Similar PS controller. Too small, stupid placement of left analog stick, Sixaxis has broken lower shoulder buttons and no force feedback,... Sony, fix this.
Finally, that list is fucked. The 2600 controller may have been an important controller (although the NES controller would be much more so), but it is crappy. Even back when I was a kid, I hated the controller. It's just broken.
Sorry, I'm having trouble reading this. You opened a bunch of tags instead of closing them. Let me just say that comparing the PS3 to the 360 is a bad idea. The 360 is a miserable failure. It had the whole next-gen market to itself for a whole year, it has tons of A-List titles from all kinds of genres, yet it still does not manage to outsell the original Xbox.
Yes. The PS3 will probably catch up with the 360 within a few years. That's not success, that's a disgrace. It should have outsold the 360 within a year or two, and it should have sold four or even five times as many consoles within 6 years.
Yeah, I think we've already established that you're financially invested in Sony. Which explains your strange arguments.
This is an entirely different argument, but I'd like to go into it anyway since you bring it up. You say that you think it was wrong for Microsoft to kill the Xbox since it was starting to gain ground. I can't see that. Microsoft had two very good reasons for killing the Xbox: First, it was entrenched in the hardcore market. The size, the looks, the games, the people who bought an Xbox, all hardcore gamers. That's a bad position to be in, since the PS2 got its market share by being the console for the average dude, not by being the hardcore console. It was too late for Microsoft to fix this, so they tried again, with a sleek, white console with lots of different launch titles.
Second, Microsoft had made mistakes when assembling parts, leaving hardware providers in a position of power. Microsoft was not able to make money on the hardware even years after launching, so they had to start fresh.
I think you're wrong. It's often a single game that acts as a catalyst to get people to buy a console. For me, Wii Sports sold the Wii, and I bought a PS3 after I saw the first Little Big Planet demonstration.
The fact that I can also play Excite Truck and Zelda and Motorstorm helped sell the consoles, but in each case, a single game convinced me to get the console.
I asked myself the same thing. I think it is legal if they distribute the earnings from the game over the period where they are still making content for it.
Many consoles have attempted to do that (even way back when, the 2600 did this; the PS2, too). Not a single one has managed to break outside of gaming.
Uhm... Your "series of unlikely events" seems pretty much out there.
A) Sony releases exclusive (God of war, Grand Tourismo, Etc. )
True, very likely.
A.2) Third party releases of say a home or business control center system using a PS3 as the center hub for Media
There is absolutely no reason to think anything like this will happen.
B) Sony Drops price of PS3 using manufacture of scale (IBM continues selling Cell Chips)
They'll use that to cut their losses before they'll cut prices.
B.2) Sony keeps price keeps the quality high and continues expanding third party apps for PS3 cell abilities. The system is powerful enough to run the electronics behind a theme park for 1/4 of the price of a customized system.
Huh. I don't even know what this is supposed to mean. Sony keeps expanding third-party apps? Huh? Sony ports third-party apps to the PS3?
C) sales increase quickly
No reason for this to happen. In fact, sales are decreasing, which means 3rd-party-support will decrease, which means even less sales.
D) BlueRay takes off
Possible. And while the PS3 might help Blu-ray (no "e", by the way), Blu-ray won't help the PS3.
E) Sony profit climbs
Possible, but certainly not thanks to the PS3.
This is something I can see intuitively.
Yeah, I can see why intuition plays a large role in your logic. Because facts don't.
Thus the reason I invested in SNE stock and will just watch it double double double for the next 5-6 years.
Ah, and that explains your cognitive dissonance. You're financially invested in Sony's success. Good luck with that.
A couple of other things to add into the mix. The system is probably 2 or 3 times more powerful than a high end gaming computer.
Except that it's not. Where did you get that idea?
The PS3 has a mediocre graphics card, and the Cell chip simply can't keep up with modern multicore PCs.
Slashdot Mirror
The fricken point of the hypothesis is that the more realistic your robot looks, the more little details you have to get right in order to make people perceive it has human. The less realistic, the more you can get wrong. All the stuff you point out does not disprove the hypothesis, in fact, it shows that it is right.
Let me say this again: The Uncanny Valley Hypothesis only concerns itself with the influence of realism on the empathy felt by an observer. It does not matter that other things also influence the empathy felt by an observer. Obviously, a well-written story will make the observer feel more empathy, but that doesn't matter for this hypothesis. Why in the world are you incapable of understanding that?
And again, this is not a scientific theory. It's a hypothesis. Obviously you can't measure how human something is in percentages. That also does not matter! It's only a hypothesis. Somebody noticed that, as robots got more human-looking, it was suddenly harder to feel empathy for them as they reached a certain realism. I mean, it's not like you couldn't test this for yourself! I actually feel more empathy for my damn Roomba than for these ugly zombie-like realistic robots, and I feel more empathy for Mario than for the characters in a modern 3D adventure with realistic human characters.
Also, this is not about "everything being cartoony." Cartoony is good! If you read Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics," you'd know that he made a similar observation: It's easier for a reader to identify with a "cartoony" character than with a realistic character.
Finally, your own theory kind of shows that Uncanny Valley is correct. You yourself say that "The closer you get to realism, the harder it gets," which is exactly what the Uncanny Valley Hypothesis states, as well. Honestly, I don't understand why you keep arguing.
I have a similar case. I develop server-side Java apps that need to run on IE. So I have IntelliJ on my Mac, and lots of different Parallels images with IE6, IE7, Vista+IE7 and various other differences. At least one instance of Windows runs all day long next to my Mac.
:-)
Of course, if you intend to play games, BootCamp is still the better solution
I'm a Mac user. Yes, I demand that developers do things differently on the Mac than on any other platform. If they don't, I don't care if they get tired of me, because I don't want their applications.
You don't just install crap all over my Mac. I want a single, simple bundle that I can install using drag-and-drop, and uninstall by dragging it to the Trash. If you absolutely need to install additional stuff, then:
If you don't do that, your application will flop on the Mac. If you create an application for the Mac, make it a Mac application and not just a Windows port.
Okay, let me try to sort this out.
First, yes, you're right, voice and writing and other factors play a role, but this is totally irrelevant as the hypothesis does not concern itself with voice and writing and other factors. It only looks at how realistic the character is rendered. I don't understand why you keep bringing up all these other points. Yes, they exist, but it is utterly nonsensical to try to disprove the Uncanny Valley by bringing up things that have nothing to do with the hypothesis. It's as if I said "people who drive faster get into worse accidents" and you replied with "you're wrong, because it also depends on whether they have airbags." It's true that it also depends on whether they have airbags, but that doesn't mean that what I stated was not true.
Second, the hypothesis talks about realistic rendering of humans. Gollum is not a realistic rendering of a human. It is a very unrealistic rendering of a human. It is a very realistic rendering of Gollum, but Gollum is no human. He's probably somewhere in the middle to middle-right of the "human likeness" axis, around the "stuffed animal" area. He's not supposed to look like a real human!
You're right, not everything that is uncanny is in the valley. Stuff on the left of the "human likeness" axis are also uncanny, because, as you say, it "isn't even close to presenting a human"!
The uncanny valley only comes into play when we are supposed to look at a character and interpret it as a realistic human. In those cases, we feel less empathy with a realistically rendered human than with a less realistically rendered human or with a less human looking character.
Again, you don't undestand the hypothesis. Please read up on it. Thanks.
Yeah, I noticed that, too, and drew the same conclusions. I think in a way, both are a bit jealous of each other. Bill wants to have Steve's taste, and Steve wants to have Bills success.
I agree. When watching the interview, at first I thought "Why are they even doing that anymore? They are two of the richest men on this planet. They could do whatever the hell they want for the rest of their lives."
But the thing is, they are doing whatever the hell they want. Steve really seems to love beauty, style and taste. He loves crafting these beautiful objects. Bill loves futuristic, sci-fi technology. He loves the idea of turning every wall into a screen, or of having multitouch tables.
I doubt either of the two cares too much about market cap or market share - they have others to do that. I think they truly are doing what they love doing, which is creating amazing new products.
This is sad. As a programming language, Javascript makes Visual Basic look good.
Why? What are your issues with JS (actually, ECMA Script, but let's stick with JS)? It's certainly not perfect, but I think most people simply don't like JS because they are not used to concepts like prototypical object orientation and duck typing, and are not willing to learn about it.
The main issue with JS is that different browsers have subtly different implementations. That's not a flaw inherent to JS, it's a flaw of the specific implementations.
I moved from NetNewsWire to Google Reader and from Mailsmith to gmail because it allows constant access to my data. No synchronization issues, no need for backups (well, less ned, I guess), and I can check my stuff at my friend's place, or in an Internet café during my holidays, or from my cell phone if there's no Internet anywhere. I wouldn't want to download and install apps there.
The difference is that we all have multiple computers now. We have a computer at work, one in the living room, one in the home office, we have a cell phone running Symbian or some other advanced OS, we have a Wii or a PS3, probably some kind of set-top box with Internet access... So you have your stuff shared across many different PCs, and you get synchronization issues. What if you want to read your personal mail at work? What if you're at a friend's place and want to quickly show him some holiday pictures on his Wii?
That's where the thin client comes in: If we store our data on one computer and use the other computers we have to access the data on that computer, we have solved this synchronization issue. The disadvantage is that now we need internet access to do all the things we used to do offline, which is where Gears (and many other recent "offline techs") come in.
FF: SW is a perfect example of how everyone looks dead. Advent Children and Gollum are perfect examples of how people can actually connect to and feel empathy for unrealistic renderings. Your example show that the Uncanny Valley hypothesis seems to be true.
I still think you're missing the point of the hypothesis. Read the wikipedia article.
First, the Uncanny Valley is a hypthesis. Second, it does not state that realistic renderings look weird. Instead, it states that humans show more and more empathy as models become more and more realistic, but that this rule breaks if we approach a perfect model, and humans suddenly look like zombies.
This can be easily observed. The unrealistic humans in "the incredibles" seem much more human than the children from "Polar Express," even though Polar Express uses a much more realistic rendering style.
Wikipedia has a good article on the topic.
What I wrote was obviously not a statistic. I did not mean "literally 80% of," I meant "a large part of." I think most humans are perfectly capable of understanding the meaning of my sentence.
Dear PC users,
We will not use parent's moronic post as a reason to insult all of you. We realize that a certain percentage of all people are morons. We realize that this applies to Windows users as well as to Mac users and Linux users. Even though not one single Apple story goes by without a PC user smugly declaring how idiotic Mac users and iPod owners are, we will not hold this against you since we assume that only a minority of all PC users consists of condescending Apple haters who presumably had a really hard childhood and now feel forced to take their anger out on Mac users.
PS: We would not mind if you lynched these idiots yourself, though.
Love,
Mac Users
I guess that's pretty much it. If Apple does something, the rest of the industry (and I don't just mean the computer industry) will follow a few months later. If Microsoft does something, 80% of all people will know about it or use it.
Oh well, what you gonna do. Here's my list:
Worst controller ever: Dual Shock/Sixaxis/Similar PS controller. Too small, stupid placement of left analog stick, Sixaxis has broken lower shoulder buttons and no force feedback, ... Sony, fix this.
Finally, that list is fucked. The 2600 controller may have been an important controller (although the NES controller would be much more so), but it is crappy. Even back when I was a kid, I hated the controller. It's just broken.
Actually, after eating out in lots of asian places recently, I figured out that it's possible to make tofu really, really delicious. Tofu FTW!
GUITAR NERO!
Sorry, I'm having trouble reading this. You opened a bunch of tags instead of closing them. Let me just say that comparing the PS3 to the 360 is a bad idea. The 360 is a miserable failure. It had the whole next-gen market to itself for a whole year, it has tons of A-List titles from all kinds of genres, yet it still does not manage to outsell the original Xbox.
Yes. The PS3 will probably catch up with the 360 within a few years. That's not success, that's a disgrace. It should have outsold the 360 within a year or two, and it should have sold four or even five times as many consoles within 6 years.
And no. The Cell isn't what you think it is.
Yeah, I think we've already established that you're financially invested in Sony. Which explains your strange arguments.
This is an entirely different argument, but I'd like to go into it anyway since you bring it up. You say that you think it was wrong for Microsoft to kill the Xbox since it was starting to gain ground. I can't see that. Microsoft had two very good reasons for killing the Xbox: First, it was entrenched in the hardcore market. The size, the looks, the games, the people who bought an Xbox, all hardcore gamers. That's a bad position to be in, since the PS2 got its market share by being the console for the average dude, not by being the hardcore console. It was too late for Microsoft to fix this, so they tried again, with a sleek, white console with lots of different launch titles.
Second, Microsoft had made mistakes when assembling parts, leaving hardware providers in a position of power. Microsoft was not able to make money on the hardware even years after launching, so they had to start fresh.
I think you're wrong. It's often a single game that acts as a catalyst to get people to buy a console. For me, Wii Sports sold the Wii, and I bought a PS3 after I saw the first Little Big Planet demonstration.
The fact that I can also play Excite Truck and Zelda and Motorstorm helped sell the consoles, but in each case, a single game convinced me to get the console.
I asked myself the same thing. I think it is legal if they distribute the earnings from the game over the period where they are still making content for it.
Many consoles have attempted to do that (even way back when, the 2600 did this; the PS2, too). Not a single one has managed to break outside of gaming.
True, very likely.
A.2) Third party releases of say a home or business control center system using a PS3 as the center hub for MediaThere is absolutely no reason to think anything like this will happen.
B) Sony Drops price of PS3 using manufacture of scale (IBM continues selling Cell Chips)They'll use that to cut their losses before they'll cut prices.
B.2) Sony keeps price keeps the quality high and continues expanding third party apps for PS3 cell abilities. The system is powerful enough to run the electronics behind a theme park for 1/4 of the price of a customized system.Huh. I don't even know what this is supposed to mean. Sony keeps expanding third-party apps? Huh? Sony ports third-party apps to the PS3?
C) sales increase quicklyNo reason for this to happen. In fact, sales are decreasing, which means 3rd-party-support will decrease, which means even less sales.
D) BlueRay takes offPossible. And while the PS3 might help Blu-ray (no "e", by the way), Blu-ray won't help the PS3.
E) Sony profit climbsPossible, but certainly not thanks to the PS3.
This is something I can see intuitively.Yeah, I can see why intuition plays a large role in your logic. Because facts don't.
Thus the reason I invested in SNE stock and will just watch it double double double for the next 5-6 years.Ah, and that explains your cognitive dissonance. You're financially invested in Sony's success. Good luck with that.
A couple of other things to add into the mix. The system is probably 2 or 3 times more powerful than a high end gaming computer.Except that it's not. Where did you get that idea?
The PS3 has a mediocre graphics card, and the Cell chip simply can't keep up with modern multicore PCs.