In 1919, Sigmund Freud’s essay ‘The Uncanny’ established the idea of binary opposites,
alive vs dead, strange vs familiar.
The uncanny is located at the midpoint of these binary opposites, when we can’t differentiate
between the two anymore.
Understanding what makes something uncanny is actually a very significant and ongoing
field of research in psychology that dates back to the early 1900s.
For something to be uncanny, it’s presence, be it visual appearance or auditory sounds,
has to produce an unsettling feeling.
Creepy things can produce unsettling feelings too, but that’s a different field of research,
where studies have shown that men and women experience creepiness in different ways.
There are actually different types of creepiness as identified by Tene and Polonetsky 2015,
such as examples of social listening where you’re being watched through your webcam
to being visited by unknown entities.
For instance, McAndrew and Koehnke (2016) found that unusual patterns of non-verbal
behaviour are seen as creepy.
Women tend to find this creepier than say clowns or aliens, which men find creepier.
However, the uncanny effect is something both men and women find equally unsettling, a very
primal fear that stems from a very modern unknown, humanoids and more recently robots.
Also it’s worth differentiating between creepy and eerie as Ho and MacDorman 2010
found that eeriness is more closely associated with the uncanny.
Things that are immortal such as online avatars or to some extent robots, don’t immediately
trigger your fight or flight response, but they do make your brain hover over the switch.
Ho et al 2008 summarized that creepiness applies to a broader range of scenarios while eeriness
applies to the cognitive response to a creepy situation
Black Mirror gets this concept really well and plays on the uncanny to make for exciting
TV.
The show’s depiction of cutting edge technology invokes unforeseen, often never ending consequences
for the cast.
Creepy → Eerie → Uncanny
The feeling of uncanny is often formed from unknown humanoid or human mimicking shapes
and experiences.
This is important for robotics because if we ever want to live in an I Robot universe
with 2004 Will Smith, our robots need to become more realistic and less of this.
This somewhat human, somewhat robot humanoid leads back to a unique psychological phenomenon
called the uncanny valley, where Japanese robotics pioneer Masahiro Mori, proposed that
near human entities creep us out much more than obvious machines and robots.
The Uncanny Valley
No one is afraid of Elon Musk's Tesla factory robots because they’re very obviously machines
and for some strange reason, the further away they are from human likeness, the less ‘sentience’
we attribute to them.
Their sole existence is to serve a functional purpose, whether it be attaching the A pillar
on a car, or giving it a fresh paint job, their appearance doesn’t matter because
Elon invested all of the skill points into function and not aesthetic.
But what if we come across something that’s 50-50, function and appearance, what is its
purpose for existence then?
That ambiguity is part of this valley where the creepiness factor goes up, because after
all, fear stems from the unknown.
Human prosthetics throw a wrench into our understanding of this valley.
The most cutting edge prosthetics are nearly indistinguishable from the real thing at a
distance, but we still find them uncanny.’
The startling coldness of a prosthetic hand is enough for us to lose our humanlike affinity
with the product, but it also gives us vital knowledge on differentiating humans from machines.
This is an important point because these uncanny faces do not provide that information, in
fact their whole point is to hide it and blend human and machine together.
What this uncanny valley is really suggesting is that things that are say 80% in resembling
a human, are often the creepiest, and designing robots that can go past technical limit is
the million dollar question in robotics.
One big giveaway that something isn’t perfectly human is the influence of movement.
In movies, zombies have deliberately stiff, rigid movements so we make no mistake that
they’re not human.
Likewise, no matter how realistic the prosthetic hand looks, when the digits begin to move,
our feelings of unease amplify.
Conversely, when we see a healthy person move, we can confirm that they’re human.
A whole robot simply magnifies this feeling of unease.
In the 90s the focus was on making more realistic looking robotic faces because the theory went
that the uncanny valley is simply a technical limitation.
Over time, more realistic faces would make us feel better at ease, but that’s definitely
not the case.
Robots with more actuated facial muscles were seen as far creepier than your household roomba
and so with the turn of the century the design focus changed.
Rather than trying to reach the second peak here, designers now try to reach the first
peak because the second is technically limited for now.
In Masahiro’s essay he g ives the example of a wooden prosthetic hand.
The colour of the wood is deliberately left with its smooth fingerprintless shape.
There’s no confusion that its a prosthetic which makes us feel more at ease.
It’s why prosthetics are shaped like this, with a focus on functionality, rather than
this.
Now, I’d like to clarify that uncanny doesn’t just have to be caused by robots.
A bad photoshop job, minor mispositioned detail or even works of art can elicit the same feelings
of unease as they create ambiguity.
It just happens to be that robots are the most prominent and indepth example to look
at in the modern day.
For instance, Mitchell Et al 2011 found that a mismatch in spoken voice increases eeriness
for both humans and robots, something that you wouldn’t be able to test for in Photoshopped
images or surrealist art.
In 2004, the Polar Express was jokingly regarded as the greatest unintentional horror movie
of the time.
It’s near lifelike animation and quality fell deeply into this uncanny valley as live
action motion capture was used to mimic lifelike movement onto clearly CGI characters.
But compare this to James Cameron’s Avatar.
Had it not been for motion capture, the film's success would have been limited.
It seems that we fear the uncanny when there’s a risk of human likeness.
This leads to what’s known as the atypical feature hypothesis, where the level of eeriness
of something is related to the human likeness of it and the presence of one or more atypical
features.
For instance in MacDorman and Ishiguro’s research, a black dot in the middle of a robot’s
head creates greater unease than the same robot without it.
We tend to interpret it as a negative deformity such as a bullet hole, tumor or third eye.
Or a more human example, having very large eyes on a small face.
Scientists theorize that we’ve developed this cautionary mechanisms to assess genetic
fitness on faces, where anything away from the Koinophillic average is uncanny.
As Burleigh Et al’s paper states it, if the atypical feature is representative of
possible infection, we experience disgust, if it were of physical threat we experience
fear and if it were of poor mate quality, we experience negative attraction.
These feelings of fear, disgust and disliking are the precursors to eeriness which comes
from the uncanny.
The second mechanism of how we fear the uncanny is the category conflict hypothesis, where
we cannot differentiate between man and machine, dead or alive, which we’ve already covered.
Both of which are reminders of one’s own mortality.
So to summarize.
The more something looks like what you expect it to look like, prototypicality, the less
we fear it.
We find things the most uncanny when they look nothing like what we expect them to look
like, but they also seem realistic and somewhat humanlike, such as humanoid shapes, alien
faces and obviously robots, automatonophobia.
The photography of Jeremy O’ sullivan is a good example.
While undoubtedly the images are of people, our brains cannot comprehend the composite
images, adding that element of ambiguity to set us on edge.
Likewise, what’s more uncanny than a wax museum.
They look 95% like the real deal but there are subtle di fferences that subconsciously
indicate that they’re not.
Part of it is to do with their posture, game designers understand this well and so characters
often have idle animations to add realism.
Also, makeup makes a huge difference in adding realism, or rather blurring the lines between
real and fake.
Photographer Andrew Lusztyk took this photo of Sandra Bullock’s wax model after applying
rouge and lipstick.
A lack of pores results in an uncanny feeling as it’s unnatural, something I’ve covered
previously on Instagram Vs Reality.
By adding makeup, we’re used to seeing faces without pores, so it doesn’t trigger a feeling
of eeriness.
Another giveaway with wax models are the eyes.
You feel as if they’re following you because they’re very clearly glass.
Real eyes have visible red capillaries across the sclera with fine microstructures in the
iris such as the collarette.
Not to mention the eye should appear to visibly glisten because it’s wet.
On a wax model these would be very expensive fine details that simply wouldn’t make sense
from a financial standpoint, instead making them fall into the uncanny valley.
As any artist can tell you, without these elements, you cannot achieve a hyperrealistic
copy.
That brings us to an end for this video, but the topic of the uncanny is a much larger
subset of what it means to be creepy, or moreso look creepy, which is a topic for a later
video.
If you would like to learn more about your own face, you can order a report at our website.
As always visit our Instagram page @qovesstudio for more facial morphs and discussion and
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