Now can we programme it to say – “The whole principle came from the idea that if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improved it by 1%, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together”
I don’t get that reference.
Uncanny Valley
Its the idea of very near simulations of humans being creepy – designers try to make CGI and robots more and more human looking in with the aim that they’ll be more friendly experiences but the result is the opposite and the feelings can be quite queazy and unsettling instead. A good recent example was when the film Team America was being made – the thunderbirds-style puppets were actually totally state of the art, in particularly they could lip-sync perfectly – but when they did lip-sync them the result was really uneasy to watch so they then had to deliberately puppeteer them clumsily to make the film watchable.
The ‘valley’ refers to a graph you’d draw of how comfortable or familiar human images are – the more lifelike they are the more comfortable they are until the get very human0like where comfort suddenly turns to revulsion – so between ‘humanoid’ and ‘human’ theres a huge trough in the graph. Its thought that because the images are very human-like but not quite reading as fully alive we react to them the same way we’d react to someone who is sick or dead
