Last night I was trying to explain to my girlfriend why this t-shirt is totally awesome and hilarious, a task which eventually led to the Wikipedia entry for “Uncanny valley,” a term used to describe the human feeling of repulsion for humanoid robots that are not completely lifelike. To my great surprise and pleasure, I found that the entry was accompanied by this awesomely ridiculous graph:
You see, if you plot the human likeness of things that move ( _ _ _ ) and things that don’t move ( ___ ) against their degree of familiarity, it is plain that zombies occupy a more central position in the uncanny valley than do stuffed animals or bunraku puppets.
My only question is: How do we classify Jeffy using this scheme?
The dashed line indicates he’s ambulatory, and he is vaguely humanoid (he clearly has a human likeness); yet for some reason he still creeps me out.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Graphing zombies
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1 comment:
Ha ha ha! You might want to check out Zizek in _Plague of Fantasies_ and his discussion of the undead.
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