Karl F. MacDorman

Indiana University Luddy School of Informatics Computing and Engineering

As virtual humans approach photorealistic perfection, they risk making real humans uncomfortable. This intriguing phenomenon, known as the uncanny valley, is well known but not well understood. In an effort to demystify the causes of the uncanny valley, this paper proposes several perceptual, cognitive, and social mechanisms that have already helpe...

It can be creepy to notice that something human-looking is not real. But can sensitivity to this phenomenon, known as the uncanny valley, be predicted from superficially unrelated traits? Based on results from at least 489 participants, this study examines the relation between nine theoretically motivated trait indices and uncanny valley sensitivit...

Human replicas may elicit unintended cold, eerie feelings in viewers, an effect known as the uncanny valley. Masahiro Mori, who proposed the effect in 1970, attributed it to inconsistencies in the replica's realism with some of its features perceived as human and others as nonhuman. This study aims to determine whether reducing realism consistency...

Computer-modeled characters resembling real people sometimes elicit cold, eerie feelings. This effect, called the uncanny valley, has been attributed to uncertainty about whether the character is human or living or real. Uncertainty, however, neither explains why anthropomorphic characters lie in the uncanny valley nor their characteristic eeriness...

The uncanny valley is a term used to describe the phenomenon that human simulations that are nearly but not quite realistic often give viewers an uneasy, eerie feeling. Given the prevalence of computer-animated human characters and a narrative framework in videogames, serious games, and health-related scenarios, it is important to examine how the u...

High-resolution remote sensing imagery finds applications in diverse fields like land-use mapping, crop planning, and disaster surveillance. To offer detailed and precise insights, reconstructing edges, textures, and other features is crucial. Despite recent advances in detail enhancement through deep learning, disparities between original and reco...

We propose a two-stage hand gesture recognition architecture to support a patient assistance system. Some medical conditions limit mobility, and the patient must rely on medical staff to meet their needs. In such cases, a phone or intercom is not convenient to call for help. A vision-based system operated by changing the orientation of fingers can...

We propose a hand gesture-operated system as an AI application to relieve discomfort and restore function in hand and arm movements caused by injuries and nerve and muscle complications. The system trains patients with hand exercises, such as performing hand gestures accurately, traversing within specified bounds, and operating a hand gesture calcu...

The uncanny valley (UV) effect is a negative affective reaction to human-looking artificial entities. It hinders comfortable, trust-based interactions with android robots and virtual characters. Despite extensive research, a consensus has not formed on its theoretical basis or methodologies. We conducted a meta-analysis to assess operationalization...

Care for chronic disease requires patient adherence to treatment advice. Nonadherence worsens health outcomes and increases healthcare costs. When healthcare professionals are in short supply, a virtual physician could serve as a persuasive technology to promote adherence. However, acceptance of advice may be hampered by the uncanny valley effect—a...

Many vision-based human-computer interaction (HCI) applications require skin detection. However, their performance relies on accuracy in detecting skin regions in video, which is difficult under uncontrolled illumination. The chromatic appearance of skin changes because of shading, often caused by body movement. To address this, we propose a dynami...

Parent–child story time is an important ritual of contemporary parenting. Recently, robots with artificial intelligence (AI) have become common. Parental acceptance of children’s storytelling robots, however, has received scant attention. To address this, we conducted a qualitative study with 18 parents using the research technique design fiction....

Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–1724) is Japan’s most celebrated playwright. His only known contribution to theater criticism, an interview with Hozumi Ikan (1738), is translated here into French for the first time. It sets out his theory of realism, illustrated with examples from puppet theater and kabuki, as a guide to writing great plays. Chikamatsu...

In 1970, Masahiro Mori proposed the uncanny valley (UV), a region in a human-likeness continuum where an entity risks eliciting a cold, eerie, repellent feeling. Recent studies have shown that this feeling can be elicited by entities modeled not only on humans but also nonhuman animals. The perceptual and cognitive mechanisms underlying the UV effe...

Robots and other artificial agents are increasingly present in eldercare, education, and at work. They are designed to help humans with tasks and to meet labor shortages?a technological fix for our times. In two experiments and a follow-up study, we investigate factors that influence the acceptance of artificial agents in positions of power, using...

Dans son essai précurseur publié en 1970, Masahiro Mori observe que l’affinité pour les robots augmente en fonction de leur ressemblance à l’humain, jusqu’à un certain point. Cependant, entre le premier pic d’affinité et le second d’indifférenciation humaine se trouve la vallée de l’étrange. Mori conseille aux créateurs d’éviter cette vallée et de...

Das unheimliche Tal Masahiro Mori Das Tal der Affinität Es gibt einen mathematischen Ausdruck, der als monoton steigende Funktion bezeichnet wird. Dabei nimmt der Wert y der Funktion f(x) zu, wenn die Variable x ebenfalls ansteigt. Je höher beispielsweise die Anstrengung x, desto höher wird der Ertrag y, je tiefer das Gaspedal x eines Fahrzeugs ge...

Masahiro Mori und das unheimliche Tal: Eine Retrospektive Karl F. MacDorman Im Jahr 1970 erschien in Energy, einer obskuren und inzwischen nicht mehr existierenden Zeitschrift, die von Esso Standard Oil, einer japanischen Tochtergesellschaft eines amerikanischen Mischkonzerns, veröffentlicht wurde, ein Essay mit dem Titel Bukimi no Tani Genshō, zu...

Background Each year, patient nonadherence to treatment advice costs the US healthcare system more than $300 billion and results in 250,000 deaths. Developing virtual consultations to promote adherence could improve public health while cutting healthcare costs and usage. However, inconsistencies in the realism of computer-animated humans may cause...

One of the main aims of humanoid robotics is to develop robots that are capable of interacting naturally with people. However, to understand the essence of human interaction, it is crucial to investigate the contribution of behavior and appearance. Our group’s research explores these relationships by developing androids that closely resemble human...

The ability of computers to recognise hand gestures visually is essential for progress in human–computer interaction. Gesture recognition has applications ranging from sign language to medical assistance to virtual reality. However, gesture recognition is extremely challenging not only because of its diverse contexts, multiple interpretations, and...

The uncanny valley hypothesis predicts that an entity appearing almost human risks eliciting cold, eerie feelings in viewers. Categorization-based stranger avoidance theory identifies the cause of this feeling as categorizing the entity into a novel category. This explanation is doubtful because stranger is not a novel category in adults; infants d...

Using a hypothetical graph, Masahiro Mori proposed in 1970 the relation between the human likeness of robots and other anthropomorphic characters and an obser-ver's affective or emotional appraisal of them. The relation is positive apart from a U-shaped region known as the uncanny valley. To measure the relation, we previously developed and validat...

One challenging research problem of hand pose recognition is the accurate detection of finger abduction and flexion with a single camera. The detection of flexion movements from a 2D image is difficult, because it involves estimation of finger movements along the optical axis of the camera (z direction). In this paper, a novel approach to hand pose...

Just as physical appearance affects social influence in human communication, it may also affect the processing of advice conveyed through avatars, computer-animated characters, and other human-like interfaces. Although the most persuasive computer interfaces are often the most human-like, they have been predicted to incur the greatest risk of falli...

Applications requiring the natural use of the human hand as a human–computer interface motivate research on continuous hand gesture recognition. Gesture recognition depends on gesture segmentation to locate the starting and end points of meaningful gestures while ignoring unintentional movements. Unfortunately, gesture segmentation remains a formid...

Change of similarity score with different α in Equation I. The frequency on the y-axis refers to the count of all gene set pairs falling into the category of a particular similarity range on the x-axis. Different α in Equation I have been used to calculate the similarity score. When α approaches 0, the distribution skewed to right with many false p...

Over the past decade, pathway and gene-set enrichment analysis has evolved into the study of high-throughput functional genomics. Owing to poorly annotated and incomplete pathway data, researchers have begun to combine pathway and gene-set enrichment analysis as well as network module-based approaches to identify crucial relationships between diffe...

More than 40 years ago, Masahiro Mori, a robotics professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, wrote an essay [1] on how he envisioned people's reactions to robots that looked and acted almost like a human. In particular, he hypothesized that a person's response to a humanlike robot would abruptly shift from empathy to revulsion as it approached...

The uncanny valley has become synonymous with the uneasy feeling of viewing an animated character or robot that looks imperfectly human. Although previous uncanny valley experiments have focused on relations among a character's visual elements, the current experiment examines whether a mismatch in the human realism of a character's face and voice c...

The novice–expert ratio method (NEM) pinpoints user interface design problems by identifying the steps in a task that have a high ratio of novice to expert completion time. This study tested the construct validity of NEM's ratio measure against common alternatives. Data were collected from 337 participants who separately performed 10 word-completio...

Interview Guiding Framework (DOC)

Demographics Questionnaire (DOC)

Robotic-assisted surgical techniques are not yet well established among surgeon practice groups beyond a few surgical subspecialties. To help identify the facilitators and barriers to their adoption, this belief-elicitation study contextualized and supplemented constructs of the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) in robotic-...

Culturally influenced preferences in website aesthetics is a topic often neglected by scholars in human–computer interaction. Kim, Lee, and Choi (2003) identified aesthetic design factors of web home pages that elicited particular responses in South Korean web users based on 13 secondary emotional dimensions. This study extends Kim et al.'s work to...

Socially assistive robots have the potential to improve the quality of life of older adults by encouraging and guiding their performance of rehabilitation exercises while offering cognitive stimulation and companionship. This study focuses on the early stages of developing and testing an interactive personal trainer robot to monitor and increase ex...

Simulated humans in computer interfaces are increasingly taking on roles that were once reserved for real humans. The presentation of simulated humans is affected by their appearance, motion quality, and interactivity. These presentational factors can influence the decisions of those who interact with them. This is of concern to interface designers...

Japan has more robots than any other country with robots contributing to many areas of society, including manufacturing, healthcare, and entertainment. However, few studies have examined Japanese attitudes toward robots, and none has used implicit measures. This study compares attitudes among the faculty of a US and a Japanese university. Although...

Humanoid robots have become appealing to the research community because of their potential versatility. However, traditional programming approaches may not reveal their full capabilities. Thus, an important goal is to develop a humanoid robot that can learn to perform complex tasks by itself. This paper proposes a method to recognize and regenerate...

The need to gather and use decentralized information and resources in responding to disasters demands an integrated interface that can support large-scale collaboration. This paper describes the development of a collaboration tool interface. The tool will surpass existing groupware and social networking applications, providing easy entry, categoriz...

In studying human interaction, an android can serve as a precisely controlled apparatus to elicit human response. However, if an android is to substitute for a human being in social, cognitive, and neuroscientific experiments, it is essential to control for the effects of appearance by designing it to look and move as much like a human being as pos...

Despite the often quoted adage “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” studies indicate people perceive certain facial and bodily proportions as attractive regardless of their culture. This preference, which is present even in infants, may be more hardwired than learned. Designers of computer games, animation, virtual reality, and robots must make...

Technology has enabled mega-collaboration on an unprecedented scale. A tool is needed to coordinate these activities and link them to government response efforts. However, in defining and responding to problems, teammates need to be able to visualize each other's mental models. The tool must encourage the team to advance promptly through team "form...

Although studies have linked culture to online user preferences and performance, few communication researchers have recognized the impact of culture on online information design and usability. It is important to ask if people are better able to use and prefer Web sites created by designers from their own culture. We propose that to improve computer...

Public use of information and computer technology (ICT) in disaster response has become a new type of "mega-collaboration." However, government policy is moving in the opposite direction, toward a strict chain-of-command model. The resulting divergence can lead to inefficiency and weakened disaster response. Hence, there is a clear need for an inte...

Percentage genomic lengths of each exon relative to the total length of its flanking introns. To underscore the fact that locating an exon in dystrophin is akin to finding a needle in a haystack, the percentage of the length of an exon relative to the total length of its 3′ and 5′ intron sequences is computed and is plotted here. The majority of th...

Number of predicted secondary structures generated in each exon. For every exon in dystrophin gene, the total number of secondary structures predicted as well as the average number of predicted secondary structures per step of transcriptional analysis is tabulated. (0.12 MB DOC)

Co-transcriptional binding accessibilities of exon 57. The horizontal axis denotes sequential steps of transcriptional analysis whereas the vertical axis denotes numbered nucleotides within the AON target site. At each step of transcriptional analysis, nucleotides in the target site that are engaged are depicted as a black dot in the plot. (0.08 MB...

First level score (L1) and third level score (L3) of 176 AON target sites analysed. This table tabulates the first level score (L1) and the third level score (L3). The AONs are sorted in ascending order of their target exon number, where the exon number is indicated in the AON names after the letter ‘h’, for e.g. h2AON1 targets exon 2. The sources...

The nucleotide accessibility score of all nucleotide in an AON target site is plotted for all the 176 AONs analysed. The horizontal axis represents the nucleotide position in the respective target exon and the nucleotide accessibility score is plotted on the vertical axis. (0.48 MB DOC)

Occurrences of engaged nucleotides at each step of transcriptional analysis for all nucleotide in an AON target site are depicted for each of the 176 AON target sites analysed. The horizontal axis denotes sequential steps of transcriptional analysis while the vertical axis denotes numbered nucleotides within the AON target site. At each step of tra...

p-values for K-S tests using the third level score (L3) and fourth level scores (L4_AVG, L4_AND and L4_OR) as test variables between Set A and Set B. (A) (++) and (+) AONs are tested between Set A and Set B for statistical difference using L3 as test variable. (B) to (E) Fourth level scores as test variables for engaged nucleotides localized at (B)...

Genomic lengths of all exons and introns of dystrophin gene. The sequence lengths for each of the 79 exons in dystrophin are plotted as black bars. For every exon, both of their flanking introns sequence lengths are shown as gray bars. Note that the sequence length is on a logarithmic scale (vertical axis). Total exonic and intronic sequence length...

The eerie feeling attributed to human-looking robots and animated characters may be a key factor in our perceptual and cognitive discrimination of the human and humanlike. This study applies regression, the generalized linear model (GLM), factor analysis, multidimensional scaling (MDS), and kernel isometric mapping (Isomap) to analyze ratings of 27...

Antisense oligonucleotides (AONs) mediated exon skipping offers potential therapy for Duchenne muscular dystrophy. However, the identification of effective AON target sites remains unsatisfactory for lack of a precise method to predict their binding accessibility. This study demonstrates the importance of co-transcriptional pre-mRNA folding in dete...

Music's allure lies in its power to stir the emotions. But the relation between the physical properties of an acoustic signal and its emotional impact remains an open area of research. This paper reports the results and possible implications of a pilot study and survey used to construct an emotion index for subjective ratings of music. The dimensio...

In 1970, an eminent Japanese roboticist, Masahiro Mori, proposed the "uncanny valley" curve to describe the emotional response of humans to nonhuman agents. At the core of his proposal is the idea that as an agent is made more humanlike, the observer's familiarity does not linearly increase as one would intuit, but falls into a "valley of eeriness,...

This paper has proposed a method of implementing humanlike motions by mapping their three-dimensional appearance to the android using a motion capture system. By measuring the android's posture and comparing it to the posture of a human subject, we propose a new method to evaluate motion sequences along bodily surfaces. Unlike other approaches that...

We have developed a multicamera system, Digital City Surveillance, which uses a new calibration-free behavior recognition method for monitoring human activity at a subway station. We trained nine support vector machines from operator-classified data to recognize 512 combinations of events. Our method of attention control greatly reduced computation...

After reviewing the papers in this special issue, I must conclude that brains are not syntactic engines, but control systems that orient to biological, interindividual, and cultural norms. By themselves, syntactic constraints both underdetermine and overdetermine cognitive operations. So, rather than serving as the basis for general cognition, they...