[Freddy]

Came across this in the news feeds - quite interesting.

"Human suspicion of realistic robots and avatars may have earlier origins than previously thought.
The phenomenon, called the uncanny valley, describes the disquiet caused by synthetic people which almost, but not quite, match human expressiveness.
Experiments with macaque monkeys show they too are suspicious of replicas that fall short of the real thing.
The research suggests a deep-seated evolutionary origin for the reactions such artificial entities evoke."

Story : http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8344203.stm

[ALADYBLOND]

i think they are not receptive to avatars and lookalikes because of the lack of smell. i can let my dog hear a dog bark on here if he sees the dog bark he gets excited then he smalls the screen no dog smell. then he loses interest.

[Bragi]

Maybe, that's also how we react.  We focus on the visual not being correct, but our subconscious should also register other missing stuff, like smell, sound that is not right, repetitive motions,...  I wonder how we would react to a person that totally has no human body odour.

[Art]

I recall many years ago an experiment where a person was blindfolded then fed a slice of onion while someone else held a slice of apple under his nose.

For the record, the subject recorded that he was given a slice of apple.

Summary: we taste what we smell.

Now...where's that clothespin?

[Freddy]

Interesting comments - I agree that smell could be an important missing factor, especially in animals.

The Uncanny Valley effect makes me think of a few things - I read somewhere that when moving images (ie movies) were first shown a lot of people were quite scared of them; people screaming in the cinema, fainting and things like that - also a lot of people found it vulgar.  Kind of similar hey ?

Also, I know someone with a 40 inch television and sometimes I find it a bit eerie how lifelike the people look on it - it's quite striking and I find myself double-taking on things that look so real.  It's not fully fledged dislike more of a wow thing, but it takes some getting used to.

[Bragi]

I recall many years ago an experiment where a person was blindfolded then fed a slice of onion while someone else held a slice of apple under his nose.

That makes me think of a test I once saw, with expert thee testers.  These people drank thee for a living and could basically say, something like, this thee consists out of x engridients, comming from location y, near town z, from year b, truely amazing.  Most of them were very certain that they had an excellent sence of taste. Than they did something with their noses so they couldn't smell anymore, blindfolded them and gave them 1 cup of thee and 1 cup of coffee. Most couldn't tell the difference. Very funny.

I know someone with a 40 inch television and sometimes I find it a bit eerie how lifelike the people look on it - it's quite striking and I find myself double-taking on things that look so real.  It's not fully fledged dislike more of a wow thing, but it takes some getting used to.

I know what you mean.  The first time I saw one of those really big tv projectors up close, during a playstation (or something similar, I forgot) boxing match, I was also pretty impressed.