Physical Induction Explains Why Over-Realistic Animation Sometimes Feels Creepy

Abstract

In the past, every progress of movie animation towards realism was viewed positively. However, recently, as computer animation is becoming more and more realistic, some people perceive the resulting realism negatively, as creepy. Similarly, everyone used to welcome robots that looked and behaved somewhat like humans; however, lately, too-humanlike robots have started causing a similar negative feeling of creepiness. There exist complex psychology-based explanations for this phenomenon. In this paper, we show that this empirical phenomenon can be naturally explained simply by physical induction – the main way we cognize the world. 1 Realistic Animation Is Creepy: An Empirical Phenomenon With technical and artistic progress, it is possible to make movie animation more and more realistic. In the beginning, a description of human beings in movie animation was not very realistic. As the new techniques develop – especially techniques of computer animation – it has become possible to have more and more realistic movie-animation description of humans. In the beginning, this progress towards realism was viewed positively. At first, the resulting progress towards more realistic animation was viewed mostly very positively, both by the critics and by the regular movie goers. Lately, an increase in realism is often viewed negatively. However, as it became possible to make animation of human beings very realistic – almost real – suddenly, movie goers started viewing this almost-perfect realism as creepy and negative; see, e.g., [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6].