The Uncanny Valley: Human-Likeness Curve

This simulation illustrates Masahiro Mori's 1970 uncanny valley hypothesis: as an artificial face is morphed from a simple cartoon toward full photorealism, human comfort and affinity toward it generally rises — but plunges sharply through a band of very-high-yet-imperfect human-likeness, the "uncanny valley," before recovering near-total realism. Drag the human-likeness slider to morph a 2D face through cartoon, stylized, uncanny and near-photoreal stages while a live graph plots the classic Mori comfort curve alongside a marker showing exactly where the current face sits — dipping into the shaded valley band in the eerie mid-to-high range. Toggle "uncanny cues" to compare the same likeness level with and without the subtle asymmetry, off-beat blink timing and blotchy skin texture that make near-human figures read as unsettling. The mechanism behind the dip — violated expectations, corpse-resemblance cues, or a conflict between "human" and "not human" categories — remains a genuinely debated question in psychology.