Developing design guidelines for characters from analyzing empirical studies on the uncanny valley

The original theory of the uncanny valley (see Figure 1) has been proposed by the Japanese scientist Masahiro Mori in 1970 [1970], where he supposed that likeability of robots does not linearly increase with human likeness. Instead, the likeability increases with human likeness at the beginning but shortly before reaching realism it turns into eeriness creating a valley in the graph. Mori called this valley "bukimi no tani", which has been later translated into "uncanny valley".