The blog post title may have you scratching the top of your head a little bit…The “Uncanny Valley” is a phenomenon that leads to a reaction from an all ‘but-not-quite-right’ simulated human form, whether it be robotic or animated. The term was invented by roboticist Masahiro Mori to depict the negative emotional response ‘real’ humans exhibit when a robot (avatar) seems practically human. Appearance and action are the two biggest factors that could potentially lead to this phenomenon playing out while one is immersed in a virtual world. Thus the overall quality of the avatar is paramount in any type of training simulation, the worst thing you can do is lead the player to possess detachment from the training. The human brain never ceases to amaze me.

“Mori’s hypothesis states that as a robot is made more humanlike in its appearance and motion, the emotional response from a human being to the robot will become increasingly positive and empathic, until a point is reached beyond which the response quickly becomes that of strong revulsion. However, as the appearance and motion continue to become less distinguishable from a human being, the emotional response becomes positive once more and approaches human-to-human empathy levels.”

“This area of repulsive response aroused by a robot with appearance and motion between a “barely human” and “fully human” entity is called the uncanny valley. The name captures the idea that a robot which is “almost human” will seem overly “strange” to a human being and thus will fail to evoke the empathic response required for productive human-robot interaction.”

You can see by the graph representation below that the “valley” in question is a dip in the graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot’s lifelikeness.

In all fairness, I guess I should disclose that one such study that examined the Uncanny Valley principle did involve monkeys…Monkey see, monkey do.

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For regular followers of the blog you have probably seen me write about avatars a time or two. Well good news- they are getting more and more realistic! So it’s no secret that various branches of the military are looking more and more closely at immersive technologies. A recent article in Signal Magazine entitled “Virtual Humans Keep it Real” outlined the Army-funded research for virtual reality being conducted at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies. A terrific example of groundbreaking technology coming from the University is with virtual humans (yes, I said virtual humans). Although these are not your ‘average’ avatar, rather they are computer programmed with artificial intelligence and capable of understanding language and able to respond appropriately. This conversation capability is not assisted in any way by a ‘real’ human and is complete with genuine emotions. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Martin E. Dempsey wrote in Army Magazine, the idea is “to make training more rigorous and relevant by leveraging technology to create challenging training environments for our leaders.” So watch out for more realistic training coming to a computer near you!

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So I’m sure that most of us have heard the term – “Death by Webinar” and yes, I too will confess to multi-tasking throughout a webinar. It just isn’t as interactive and interesting as other stuff I could be doing. So for WebEx and death by PowerPoint, oh the hours we have all spent putting together those snazzy little PowerPoint presentations. Are webinars really still a breakthrough technology? In my humble opinion the presenter of the webinar speeds through the slides and the attendees aren’t given the ability to learn at their own pace, providing for information transfer but not much learning.

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