Our discussions on immediacy in class reminded me of the Uncanny Valley Theory. I'll summarize it for those of you who don't want to read the lengthy wikipedia entry. The Uncanny Valley is a theory that a Japanese roboticist came up with to explain emotional responses between humans towards robots. Basically, the theory says that as a robot (or any depiction of a human) becomes more humanlike in appearance and motion then the human response towards it will become more positive, until a point is reached where the robot suddenly becomes repulsive to the human - this is the "valley" in the name, where the levels of empathy dip suddenly. At a certain point, however, the robot again becomes acceptable to the human, until it's finally indistinguishable from a real human. The Uncanny Valley also explains the popularity of Giga Pets. When the theory first came out it mostly applied to robots, but now we can use it to look at things like CGI movies and video games. The thing that's sort of problematic about the theory though is that we haven't really reached the other side of the valley. No matter how much work we put into video game technology, every human character still seems weird and zombie-like. I guess this is really only tangentially related to the discussion of immediacy, but it does raise some interesting questions about how much further we need to go to achieve immediacy in CGI films and video games especially. I know that I've usually preferred games that are more low-tech to the ones that have the newest and greatest graphics.