Readings 5

"Androids as an Experimental Apparatus: Why is There an Uncanny Valley and Can We Exploit It?"
by Karl F. MacDorman

Oddly a few weeks ago in my Real Time/ Unreal Space class we were talking about the Uncanny Valley. No one brought up the subject of death. We were also talking about 3D modeling and not robots. However that in of itself gives little validity to the experiment. I did not like the experiment they ran. To say that a series of pictures changes a test subjects view is a lofty and conceited thing to say. Yes images do guide us to different opinions but to say that these people chose the speech because of an unconscious fear of death because another studies said they would prefer that speech is off. The correlation is off. A does not equal B, it might be an interesting relation but it is not an equal one. The whole experiment seemed to well guided as it set up the answers it wanted to hear. There are a lot of factors in the uncanny valley and to list it to one is preposterous. Death is a factor for some people as seen in the interviews but is it a major factor probably not. However the uncanny valley is something that most artists must deal with. Hollywood for some reason is embracing it with movies like Sky Captain and Beowulf. I think it is a poor choice but that is my aesthetic opinion. In robotics and some forms of 3D this is a problem. I like the idea of making the obviously unreal real like Chico MacMurtrie's work.

"Interactive Theatre"
by Cynthia Breazeal and crew

First off I like the way they spelled theatre. Also the comments from unnamed folks in our department would say about this..."robots are not art." I agree that the key to social interaction in general (not just robots) is moving away from standard input devices. You can see this with my fascination with gesture recognition. The fact that things must communicate in a way we can understand with avoiding the uncanny valley is very important to design.