Masahiro Mori's influential 1970 article, Bukimi no Tani Gensho, describes
a phenomenon where the appeal of animated beings undergoes a steep
non-linearity as they become increasingly similar to humans.
Subsequently labeled the "Uncanny Valley"
as a reference to Sigmund Freud's 1916 essay on the Uncanny, the
Uncanny Valley continues to have widespread influence in the fields of robotics,
design, gaming, computer animation, art, and plastic surgery.
For this special event, Emeritus Professor Mori will address an audience of
international researchers in Robotics to comment on the thinking behind
his article and how it has evolved over the past 40 years, followed by responses from
a panel of roboticists and media theorists.
(Left to Right:
Ishiguru, Asada, Michalowski,Murphey,Khatib,Jochum,Mori,Goldberg,Kageki,Lunenfeld,Inoue,Fujihata)
Featured Speaker: Masahiro Mori, Prof. Emeritus, Tokyo Institute of Technology
(with simultaneous translation by Ms. Norri Kageki)
Panelists:
- Masaki Fujihata, Tokyo U. of the Arts
- Hiroshi Ishiguro, Osaka U.
- David Hanson, Hanson Robotics
- Elizabeth Jochum, University of Copenhagen
- Oussama Khatib, Stanford U.
- Peter Lunenfeld, UCLA
- Marek Michalowski, BeatBot
- Todd Murphey, Northwestern U.
- Daniela Rus, MIT
Co-Chairs:
- Minoru Asada, Osaka U.
- Ken Goldberg, UC Berkeley
Special thanks to Hirochika Inoue and Shigeki Sugano and Erico Guizzo
for help organizing and the co-chairs, speakers, and attendees of the Workshop below.
Previous Workshop:
Art and Robots: Freud's Unheimlich and the Uncanny Valley
An International Workshop at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and
Automation, Kongresszentrum Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe, Germany, May 10, 2013.
This one-day workshop at the premier conference for robotics
researchers brought together technologists, artists, and theorists to
explore past and future relationships between art and
robotics. Artworks involving robots have a rich and extensive history
dating back to the ancient Greeks, through da Vinci, Jean Tinguely,
Nam June Paik, Survival Research Labs, Jonathon Borofsky, and
Stelarc. The workshop references Freud's 1919 aesthetic essay on
E.T.A. Hoffman's 1816 horror tale The Sandman (which includes an
automaton as a central character). Freud's term "Der Unheimliche" is
usually translated as "The Uncanny". Freud's concept of the Uncanny
is familiar in art history and has been applied to many novels,
paintings, sculptures, and films. The term was later applied to a
phenomenon noted by Masahiro Mori in 1970 where the human
psychological experience of being unnerved by robots that are highly
similar to humans.
