Boston Dynamics showed off a new design for its Atlas robot, and paired with a new video, it’s proven to be a very unsettling creation. One option to fix that? Make it hairy.
On Wednesday, Boston Dynamics announced the new version of its Atlas robot with a characteristically unsettling video. In it, a humanoid android lifts itself up from the floor by bending its legs backward and then swivels its fathomless void of a head a full 180 degrees like it’s Linda Blair in The Exorcist. The footage is obviously creepy.
MacDorman emphasized that what really makes Atlas creepy is not the hair, or lack thereof, but the inhuman movement. Masahiro Mori, the scientist responsible for the theory of the uncanny valley, created two separate graphs for the uncanny valley: one for still objects and another for moving things. That feeling of uncanniness, MacDorman told me, “is much more pronounced for moving objects.” The academic literature on hairy robots is sadly limited — and the results are mixed.
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