Uncanny Valley

The uncanny valley is a hypothesized psychological and aesthetic relationship between how closely an object resembles a human being and the emotional response that object produces in an observer. The hypothesis predicts that an entity appearing almost, but not quite, human will elicit uncanny or eerie feelings in the people who view it, rather than the increasing warmth that greater realism might otherwise be expected to produce. Examples of the phenomenon have been documented in robots, animatronics and lifelike dolls, as well as in visuals produced by 3D computer animation and, increasingly, by artificial intelligence, and the growing realism of technologies such as virtual reality, augmented reality and photorealistic computer animation has kept debate over the effect very much alive.