Takahiro Kawabe

Takahiro Kawabe, Kyoshiro Sasaki, Keiko Ihaya et al.

Artificial objects often subjectively look eerie when their appearance to some extent resembles a human, which is known as the uncanny valley phenomenon. From a cognitive psychology perspective, several explanations of the phenomenon have been put forth, two of which are object categorization and realism inconsistency. Recently, MacDorman and Chattopadhyay (2016) reported experimental data as evidence in support of the latter. In our estimation, however, their results are still consistent with categorization-based stranger avoidance. In this Discussions paper, we try to describe why categorization-based stranger avoidance remains a viable explanation, despite the evidence of MacDorman and Chattopadhyay, and how it offers a more inclusive explanation of the impression of eeriness in the uncanny valley phenomenon.

Takahiro Kawabe, Taiki Fukiage, Masataka Sawayama et al.

Light projection is a powerful technique to edit appearances of objects in the real world. Based on pixel-wise modification of light transport, previous techniques have successfully modified static surface properties such as surface color, dynamic range, gloss and shading. Here, we propose an alternative light projection technique that adds a variety of illusory, yet realistic distortions to a wide range of static 2D and 3D projection targets. The key idea of our technique, named Deformation Lamps, is to project only dynamic luminance information, which effectively activates the motion (and shape) processing in the visual system, while preserving the color and texture of the original object. Although the projected dynamic luminance information is spatially inconsistent with the color and texture of the target object, the observer's brain automatically com- bines these sensory signals in such a way as to correct the inconsistency across visual attributes. We conducted a psychophysical experiment to investigate the characteristics of the inconsistency correction, and found that the correction was dependent critically on the retinal magnitude of inconsistency. Another experiment showed that perceived magnitude of image deformation by our techniques was underestimated. The results ruled out the possibility that the effect by our technique stemmed simply from the physical change of object appearance by light projection. Finally, we discuss how our techniques can make the observers perceive a vivid and natural movement, deformation, or oscillation of a variety of static objects, including drawn pictures, printed photographs, sculptures with 3D shading, objects with natural textures including human bodies.