The Impact of the Uncanny Valley Effect on the Perception of Animated Three-Dimensional Humanlike Characters

Abstract

The uncanny valley theory holds that when 3D animation human characters look and act almost like real humans, it causes repulsion in cinema audiences. The ‘valley’ is a dip in positivity—that is, how well-disposed audiences respond to 3D character’s lifelikeness as indicated on a graph. The research question was how the uncanny valley affects the perceptions of audiences observing the combined emotional and expressive locomotion of animated humanlike characters. In this study the aim was not to bridge the valley, but rather to find out how the different styles of animated characters, from cartoon characters to photorealistic characters are affected by the uncanny valley. In this study it is hoped that animation film makers and students would be made more aware of the uncanny valley in different styles of animation and how to avoid it. The results showed that, when animating 3D CG characters, the design of the character does have an impact on the audiences’ perception level of immersion and emotional bonding with the CG characters as audiences are more sensitive to any imperfections in the applied animation to realistic CG characters than to the stylized characters.