Survival horror games - an uncanny modality

This study investigates the relationship between the perceived eeriness of a virtual character with the perception of human-likeness for some attributes of motion and sound. 100 participants were asked to rate 13 video clips of 12 different virtual characters and one human. The results indicate that attributes of motion and sound do exaggerate the uncanny phenomenon and how frightening that character is perceived to be. Strong correlations were identified for the perceived eeriness for a character with how human-like a character's voice sounded, how human-like facial expression appeared and the synchronization of the character's sound with lip movement; characters rated as the least synchronized were perceived to be the most frightening. Based on the results of this study, this paper seeks to define an initial set of hypotheses for the fear-evoking aspects of character facial rendering and vocalization in survival horror games that can be used by game designers seeking to increase the fear factor in the genre and that will form the basis of further experiments which, it is hoped, will lead to a conceptual framework for the uncanny

Effect of emotion and articulation of speech on the Uncanny Valley in virtual characters

This paper presents a study of how exaggerated facial expression in the lower face region affects perception of emotion and the Uncanny Valley phenomenon in realistic, human-like, virtual characters. Characters communicated the six basic emotions, anger, disgust, fear, sadness and surprise with normal and exaggerated mouth movements. Measures were taken for perceived familiarity and human-likeness. The results showed that: an increased intensity of articulation significantly reduced the uncanny for anger; yet increased perception of the uncanny for characters expressing happiness with an exaggeration of mouth movement. The practical implications of these findings are considered when controlling the uncanny in virtual characters