Making Simple Robots, 2nd Edition

did an experiment. He asked test subjects to rate how much they liked

different pictures of people, from cartoons to photographs. The more real

the picture, the better the test subjects liked them. When he put the test

results on a chart, it looked like a line that kept going up as the images

became more real. Right before the end, however, the line took a sharp dip

downward and then came back up, like a valley between two mountains.

Mori concluded that when the image looked almost human but not quite, it

went from being friendly to scary.

It took many more years before robots looked human enough to fall into

the Uncanny Valley. Some of the firs ...