The uncanny valley is a hypothesis in the field of robotics and 3D computer animation, which holds that when human replicas look and act almost, but not perfectly, like actual human beings, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The "valley" in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot's human likeness.
Masharo Mori a cybernist was interested how we react to robots. He suggested that as robot appear increasingly more, as human we will emphatise feeling more comfortable with them. But, he noted that there is an area between appearing like a human and reacting like a human makes us feel rather uncomfortable. That is why he called that 'the uncanny valley'. This term has now been used extensively in the CGI.
Does the Valley actually exist?
-- There is a moment, when these robots are making us feel a bit uncomfotrable. While robot looks practically basic, not human look-alike, we look at them like cute objects, but when we seem them human look-alike, it makes us feel rather confused and responsle is slightly different. For example, i'm feeling more like panicking. So, as the definition is created and explained - video above, it is absolutely certain that the Valley defenately exist.
Personality characters in games.
-- With this topic I found few rather interesting articles online on the topic:
1. Computer game addicts share some personality characteristics with people with Aspergers'
People who are addicted to playing computer games show some of the same personality traits as people with Asperger's syndrome.
This is the conclusion of Dr John Charlton of the University of Bolton and Ian Danforth of Whitman College, USA. Their results will be presented at the British Psychological Society's Annual Conference in Dublin today, Thursday 3 April 2008.
The researchers questioned 391 computer game players, 86 per cent of whom were male. They considered relationships between addiction, 'high engagement' and personality.
They found that the closer the players got to addiction the more likely they were to display negative personality traits. And that as players showed more signs of addiction they were increasingly characterised by three personality traits that would normally be associated with Asperger's, a variety of high functioning autism. These were neuroticism, and lack of extraversion and agreeableness.
The researchers believe that these people are not classifiable as having Aspergers syndrome but share some of the same characteristics because they find it easier to empathise with computer systems than other people.
Dr Charlton (pictured) said: 'The thinking in the field is that there is a scale along which people, even those considered to be 'normal', can be placed upon. And that people such as engineers, mathematicians and computer scientists are nearer to the non-empathising, systemising, end of the spectrum, with people with Asperger's syndrome even further along again.
'Our research supports the idea that people who are heavily involved in game playing may be nearer to autistic spectrum disorders than people who have no interest in gaming.' http://www.bolton.ac.uk/News/News-Articles/2008/apr2008-2.aspx
This is the conclusion of Dr John Charlton of the University of Bolton and Ian Danforth of Whitman College, USA. Their results will be presented at the British Psychological Society's Annual Conference in Dublin today, Thursday 3 April 2008.
The researchers questioned 391 computer game players, 86 per cent of whom were male. They considered relationships between addiction, 'high engagement' and personality.
They found that the closer the players got to addiction the more likely they were to display negative personality traits. And that as players showed more signs of addiction they were increasingly characterised by three personality traits that would normally be associated with Asperger's, a variety of high functioning autism. These were neuroticism, and lack of extraversion and agreeableness.
The researchers believe that these people are not classifiable as having Aspergers syndrome but share some of the same characteristics because they find it easier to empathise with computer systems than other people.
Dr Charlton (pictured) said: 'The thinking in the field is that there is a scale along which people, even those considered to be 'normal', can be placed upon. And that people such as engineers, mathematicians and computer scientists are nearer to the non-empathising, systemising, end of the spectrum, with people with Asperger's syndrome even further along again.
'Our research supports the idea that people who are heavily involved in game playing may be nearer to autistic spectrum disorders than people who have no interest in gaming.' http://www.bolton.ac.uk/News/News-Articles/2008/apr2008-2.aspx
2.The Personality of Immersion in Video Games and Virtual Worlds
A recent study by Weibel, Wissmath and Mast (2010) examines the Big Five personality correlates of immersion in virtual environments, finding that high Openness to Experience, Neuroticism, and Extraversion are positively related to the tendency to be immersed.
Immersion is not very clearly defined in the article, so we’ll have to assume they’re using the layman’s definition – that feeling you get where the outside world fades away and your entire attention is on the game/virtual environment. This seems related to the concepts of engagement in business research and flow in psychology, although this paper makes no attempt to pull in either.
The results here are somewhat atheoretical, as there was no a priori attempt to link personality traits to specific characteristics related to immersion. There’s certainly nothing wrong with a brute force empirical approach, but it does change the sorts of conclusions that can be made. This work found that all three personality traits were related to emotional involvement (one dimension of immersion) while only Openness was related to absorption (the other dimension). Neuroticsm was also the most strongly related to emotional involvement of the three. But the specific reasons for these variables to correlate in this way (i.e. Why are neurotic people more likely to be immersed?”) are unclear.
There are certainly limitations. The research was conducted entirely via survey with a 21% response rate. Immersion is studied here as immersive tendency, a personality trait with items like, “How frequently do you find yourself closely identifying with the characters in a story line?” While the authors make a claim that this is related to immersion in “mediated environments,” it’s not clear if such general immersive tendencies would translate into actual differences in behavior, and furthermore if immersive tendencies in technology-mediated environments could be measured with items like the example given above. The low response rate also raises some concern about missingness, although the severity of this problem depends on why people were missing.
Still, the implications are interesting. If these three personality traits are related to tendencies toward immersion, and if this generalized to immersion in virtual environments, it opens up the possibility we can predict engagement level in technology-mediated training programs from personality, which would potentially affect how much trainees learned from those environments, holding all other features constant. For example, I might hypothesize from this that people high in Openness would be more engaged in a training program held in Second Life rather than in person, and would as a result experience better learning outcomes from the Second Life training program. http://neoacademic.com/2010/06/29/the-personality-of-immersion-in-video-games-and-virtual-worlds/
Immersion is not very clearly defined in the article, so we’ll have to assume they’re using the layman’s definition – that feeling you get where the outside world fades away and your entire attention is on the game/virtual environment. This seems related to the concepts of engagement in business research and flow in psychology, although this paper makes no attempt to pull in either.
The results here are somewhat atheoretical, as there was no a priori attempt to link personality traits to specific characteristics related to immersion. There’s certainly nothing wrong with a brute force empirical approach, but it does change the sorts of conclusions that can be made. This work found that all three personality traits were related to emotional involvement (one dimension of immersion) while only Openness was related to absorption (the other dimension). Neuroticsm was also the most strongly related to emotional involvement of the three. But the specific reasons for these variables to correlate in this way (i.e. Why are neurotic people more likely to be immersed?”) are unclear.
There are certainly limitations. The research was conducted entirely via survey with a 21% response rate. Immersion is studied here as immersive tendency, a personality trait with items like, “How frequently do you find yourself closely identifying with the characters in a story line?” While the authors make a claim that this is related to immersion in “mediated environments,” it’s not clear if such general immersive tendencies would translate into actual differences in behavior, and furthermore if immersive tendencies in technology-mediated environments could be measured with items like the example given above. The low response rate also raises some concern about missingness, although the severity of this problem depends on why people were missing.
Still, the implications are interesting. If these three personality traits are related to tendencies toward immersion, and if this generalized to immersion in virtual environments, it opens up the possibility we can predict engagement level in technology-mediated training programs from personality, which would potentially affect how much trainees learned from those environments, holding all other features constant. For example, I might hypothesize from this that people high in Openness would be more engaged in a training program held in Second Life rather than in person, and would as a result experience better learning outcomes from the Second Life training program. http://neoacademic.com/2010/06/29/the-personality-of-immersion-in-video-games-and-virtual-worlds/
3.Personality Drives Us Toward Violent Videogames
Chory and Goodboy (2010) investigate this in the context of the Big Five personality traits – openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism/emotional stability. They examine this in the context of the “media uses and gratifications perspective,” which posits that the interaction between basic human needs and society result in a motivation to gratify certain other needs. This perspective isn’t explained much more clearly than this, but as far as I can tell, this means that we are motivated to consume media (e.g. television, video games) in order to interact more directly with society as a whole. Well… okay. If you guys say so.
They do discuss several specific motivations to play video games, which a person might have in any combination:
arousal - to feel emotions (e.g. to be excited, scared, angry, etc.)
challenge – to test skills and ability, for your own sake
competition - to test skills and ability, for others’ sake
diversion – to reduce stress or for escapism
fantasy - to take the role/identity of someone else
social interaction - for social rewards associated with interacting with other people
I would hope, given this setup, that they would test the relationship between the Big Five and these dimensions of video game playing motivation. Unfortunately, they didn’t. They justify this in a peculiar way:
''although the current study was grounded in the uses and gratifications perspective, neither motives nor gratifications obtained were assessed. This approach is consistent with that of Krcmar and Kean who suggested that researchers may infer motives for media use by studying the relationship between personality and media. To validate the present study’s findings further, however, future research should measure players’ motives for violent video game play and the gratifications they experience.''
Let me paraphrase: “It’s okay that we didn’t measure their motives because another researcher said that was a fine approach. But future, OTHER researchers should definitely measure them.” Thanks for that – real helpful.
So instead, the researchers simply examined the correlations between violent video game play and the Big Five. So this doesn’t really give us any information on the specific motivations for video game play. This is an important point that I’ll get back to. For now, it does give us a more general picture of motivation.
Overall, they found that people high in openness and also people low in agreeableness were more likely to play violent video games. Extraversion was also positively related, but I suspect they did not have a sufficient sample size to find a significant result here. Agreeableness was the strongest of these relationships, though it was not large: r = -.23.
They also conducted some peculiar secondary analyses examining differences in personality based on the violence of people’s “most-played video game” and “second most-played video game” but this is an artificial dichotomy, and as a result, the relationships are artificially inflated, so I don’t place much trust in these values.
What’s peculiar about this study, which the authors discuss, is that it is at odds with some other violent media research. Personality, for example, does not predict attraction to action films, which theoretically contain more violence than other genres. But this may be due to the contamination of the “violence” construct in such studies – action does not necessarily “equal” violence, so these studies must be considered with some caution.
Up to this point, I am with the authors. This seems like a totally innocent study of video-game playing motivation. But then they take is a step further – a step unjustified by their research:
''If, as the results of this study suggest, personality motivates frequency of violent video game play and the violent/nonviolent nature of video games individuals play, then certain personality types may be more vulnerable to the effects of these games than others. As playing violent video games is associated with increased aggression, individuals who are less agreeable, more open, more extroverted, and less neurotic may be more likely to develop aggressive tendencies than persons with other personality compositions because they play violent video games more frequently than do these others.''
This makes a blanket assumption that “more violent games” leads to “more aggression” – a causal relationship. This has never been demonstrated empirically. Certainly, when children are exposed to violent video games, they are more likely to engage in violent behavior for a short time afterward. But this is true of any displays of violence – children tend to model behavior they witness (see Bandura’s social learning theory). There is little evidence that this is true in adults, and definitely no evidence that exposure to violence over time leads to more aggression over time. This is simply an assertion, and one not backed by the evidence they present here.
This also assumes that “attraction” equals “vulnerability.” That’s not a stretch – it’s broken logic.
This is also where the specific motivations that they did not measure come into play. If the researchers had, for example, linked these personality traits to play for arousal, they might be able to make a case that people playing violent video games did so because they enjoyed the feelings they got from being violent. But unfortunately they did not measure this, and thus these conclusions are overreaching.
At the least, we now can say that open, disagreeable, and possibly also extraverted people are attracted to violent video games. We also know that personality is at least in part genetically driven, which suggests that attraction to violent video games may be partially genetic. And that’s pretty interesting all by itself. http://neoacademic.com/2010/12/15/personality-drives-us-toward-violent-videogames/
Chory and Goodboy (2010) investigate this in the context of the Big Five personality traits – openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism/emotional stability. They examine this in the context of the “media uses and gratifications perspective,” which posits that the interaction between basic human needs and society result in a motivation to gratify certain other needs. This perspective isn’t explained much more clearly than this, but as far as I can tell, this means that we are motivated to consume media (e.g. television, video games) in order to interact more directly with society as a whole. Well… okay. If you guys say so.
They do discuss several specific motivations to play video games, which a person might have in any combination:
arousal - to feel emotions (e.g. to be excited, scared, angry, etc.)
challenge – to test skills and ability, for your own sake
competition - to test skills and ability, for others’ sake
diversion – to reduce stress or for escapism
fantasy - to take the role/identity of someone else
social interaction - for social rewards associated with interacting with other people
I would hope, given this setup, that they would test the relationship between the Big Five and these dimensions of video game playing motivation. Unfortunately, they didn’t. They justify this in a peculiar way:
''although the current study was grounded in the uses and gratifications perspective, neither motives nor gratifications obtained were assessed. This approach is consistent with that of Krcmar and Kean who suggested that researchers may infer motives for media use by studying the relationship between personality and media. To validate the present study’s findings further, however, future research should measure players’ motives for violent video game play and the gratifications they experience.''
Let me paraphrase: “It’s okay that we didn’t measure their motives because another researcher said that was a fine approach. But future, OTHER researchers should definitely measure them.” Thanks for that – real helpful.
So instead, the researchers simply examined the correlations between violent video game play and the Big Five. So this doesn’t really give us any information on the specific motivations for video game play. This is an important point that I’ll get back to. For now, it does give us a more general picture of motivation.
Overall, they found that people high in openness and also people low in agreeableness were more likely to play violent video games. Extraversion was also positively related, but I suspect they did not have a sufficient sample size to find a significant result here. Agreeableness was the strongest of these relationships, though it was not large: r = -.23.
They also conducted some peculiar secondary analyses examining differences in personality based on the violence of people’s “most-played video game” and “second most-played video game” but this is an artificial dichotomy, and as a result, the relationships are artificially inflated, so I don’t place much trust in these values.
What’s peculiar about this study, which the authors discuss, is that it is at odds with some other violent media research. Personality, for example, does not predict attraction to action films, which theoretically contain more violence than other genres. But this may be due to the contamination of the “violence” construct in such studies – action does not necessarily “equal” violence, so these studies must be considered with some caution.
Up to this point, I am with the authors. This seems like a totally innocent study of video-game playing motivation. But then they take is a step further – a step unjustified by their research:
''If, as the results of this study suggest, personality motivates frequency of violent video game play and the violent/nonviolent nature of video games individuals play, then certain personality types may be more vulnerable to the effects of these games than others. As playing violent video games is associated with increased aggression, individuals who are less agreeable, more open, more extroverted, and less neurotic may be more likely to develop aggressive tendencies than persons with other personality compositions because they play violent video games more frequently than do these others.''
This makes a blanket assumption that “more violent games” leads to “more aggression” – a causal relationship. This has never been demonstrated empirically. Certainly, when children are exposed to violent video games, they are more likely to engage in violent behavior for a short time afterward. But this is true of any displays of violence – children tend to model behavior they witness (see Bandura’s social learning theory). There is little evidence that this is true in adults, and definitely no evidence that exposure to violence over time leads to more aggression over time. This is simply an assertion, and one not backed by the evidence they present here.
This also assumes that “attraction” equals “vulnerability.” That’s not a stretch – it’s broken logic.
This is also where the specific motivations that they did not measure come into play. If the researchers had, for example, linked these personality traits to play for arousal, they might be able to make a case that people playing violent video games did so because they enjoyed the feelings they got from being violent. But unfortunately they did not measure this, and thus these conclusions are overreaching.
At the least, we now can say that open, disagreeable, and possibly also extraverted people are attracted to violent video games. We also know that personality is at least in part genetically driven, which suggests that attraction to violent video games may be partially genetic. And that’s pretty interesting all by itself. http://neoacademic.com/2010/12/15/personality-drives-us-toward-violent-videogames/
--Has Art always stived for Realism?
To start with - what is Realism? Realism in relation to art is when the subject of the artist is shown in a realistic manner, as close to 'reality' as possible - the way the subject actually looked. Realist artists chose subjects from everyday life around them. Often we see in their paintings images of some the poorer members of society. Before this, such subjects had been deliberately overlooked by many artists.
Realism is defined by the accurate, unembellished, and detailed depiction of nature or contemporary life. The movement prefers an observation of physical appearance rather than imagination or idealization.
For me, it's hard to say, yes or no, but I would rather say yes, cause human being as a charaster have always reached for perfection in any form. Not only art. Shure it's quite hard to adopt this to robotics. Way for art can be different - it can be Realism or Cubism, which is rather unreal. The same in robotics, we can made something as realistic, we can attach it to Uncanny Valey, or we can go in completely other direction and create something rather unreal, like this for example:
As result, I would say that straight answer for this question doesn't exist.
