Uncanny Valley Theory

The uncanny valley theory was proposed in 1970 by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori. It describes human emotional responses to humanoid robots: when a robot resembles a human but is not fully identical, affinity drops sharply and discomfort arises; when similarity crosses a threshold and becomes nearly indistinguishable, affinity rises again. The theory is widely applied in speech synthesis, virtual humans, and related fields.