The uncanny valley is a hypothesis that as a robot is made more humanlike, the emotional response from a human to the robot becomes increasingly positive, until a point of human-likeness is reached beyond which the response quickly becomes that of strong repulsion.The phenomenon can be explained by the notion that, if an entity is sufficiently non-human, then the humanlike characteristics tend to stand out, generating empathy. But if the entity is "almost human", then the non-human characteristics will be the ones that stand out, leading to a feeling of "strangeness" in the human viewer.
Check out the wikipedia entry here.
The uncanny valley is one of my favorite theories. And this blog is about my own uncanny valley: that place between the common and uncommon, where things strike me as both interesting as strange.
