While theories of the “uncanny valley” are debatable (see Hanson’s “Upending the Uncanny Valley” (.pdf)), the quest for human-like androids and automatons continue to compel their designers. At Carnegie-Mellon University’s anthropomorphism.org, I found an interesting early study of robot head design that shows how these designers sometimes make choices about when to make robots anthropomorphic […]
Tag: robots
Robots and Scarecrows: The Crowbot
“On a distant Ag planet, there are robotic scarecrows to mind the vast farming fields…” — From toy designer “Cozy Rampage”
Andrew Huang’s Uncanny Videos
I thank my colleagues at Seton Hill University, Laura Patterson and Maureen Vissat, for recently passing along a YouTube link to “Doll Face” by Andrew Huang. It’s a brilliant treatment of the relationship between media technology and gender identity, using uncanny structures like automatism and the compulsion to repeat to deliver its message. The video […]
Creepy Automata Videos
For Halloween, the readers of Oobject voted for their Top 12 Videos of Creepy Automata. A great theme, from cats in a milk churn to maniacally laughing dolls. One of my favorites is this clip of a Decaying 1880s Automaton Harpist by Vichy: I won’t belabor how uncanny the signifiers are here, from the doll’s […]
Cractroids
Parody is a good barometer for popularity. The humor magazine, Cracked, sends up The 7 Creepiest Real-Life Robots. Robert Brockway’s bawdy, Rated-R write ups include hilarious (yet astutely observed) rationales for “why it’s so, so creepy,” like this one for the “Actroid” robot pictured above: The Actroid is fairly tame on the creepy scale … […]
Android Science and the Uncanny Valley
In addition to sharing his published research online on his website, Karl F. MacDorman has a series of youtube videos from his presentation on the the “uncanny valley” in android science, given at the 2007 NMC Summer Conference , hosted by the Indiana University School of Informatics (June 6, 2007). Below is part VII of the lecture. Mind […]
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