The Uncanny Valley in Pictures of Beautiful Women

The Uncanny Valley in Pictures of Beautiful Women
Photographs that create this effect by accident!

The Uncanny Valley is described as a near-identical resemblance to a human being that arouses a sense of unease or revulsion in the person viewing it. (See definition.)

Examples abound in computer-generated simulations and in humanoid robotics, where the human resemblance comes too close to the mark, falling just short enough to invoke horror. (It's a critical point: If a human simulation is super-close to the original -- the effect doesn't occur. If it's not close enough -- it seems like a caricature and feels harmless.)

Famous 'robotic' examples can be found in this article (www.strangerdimensions.com) and are reproduced below. Most examples of the Uncanny Valley Effect are of robotic or 'humanoid' character. But -- with the advent of CGI -- the Uncanny Valley is also found in games and movies as well, as seen in the third and fourth pictures below (www.buzzfeed.com).

Image: Creepy Girl

Japanese android

Medal of Honor: Warfighter

Polar Express (2004)

Perhaps a new wrinkle in this phenomenon has developed. I've been finding the Uncanny Valley Effect in so-called normal people, depicted in photographs all across the Web. (Some of the actual images make me shudder.) These photographs all depict beautiful ladies, mostly models or celebrities -- but for some reason, their photographic exteriors look wrong or misconfigured -- at least on my PC screen. The pictures are clean and undoctored, taken mostly from online fashion sites, where (presumably) they were meant to be seen as enticing. The female subjects appear to resemble human beings -- but not quite closely enough, it would seem...