Severed heads line the route to uncanny valley

Wendy Zukerman, Asia-Pacific reporter

(Image: Christian Koos)

Severed heads with the power of speech have titillated and repulsed audiences for centuries. They feature in vintage science fiction, the writings of Shakespeare and as far back as Greek mythology.

According to Jane Goodall at the University of Western Sydney, Australia, robots are today?s bodiless heads. ?They are the personification of what we don't know,? she says.

Speaking at last week's Thinking Systems Frontiers symposium in Sydney, Goodall argued that just as Orpheus?s severed head of Greek legend knew things that mere mortals never could, robots collect information from mysterious terrain. ?They go where we can't go.?

The symposium, held at Sydney?s Powerhouse Museum, explored the growing interaction between humans and machines. Delving further into that theme, Goodall brought up the ?uncanny valley? phenomenon, whereby we enjoy robots with some human features, but get freaked out when their looks or behaviour are too realistic. ?An artificial head is fine, but please don't let it smile,? she says. Goodall suspects that our aversion to lifelike robots is caused by our loss of power. ?As we get closer to the valley, we question who is in control,? she says.

It is precisely this concept that the artist Stelarc attempted to explore at the symposium in his work Spinning/Screaming: Event for amplified head.

On stage, Stelarc donned a thick visor, and wires were attached to his arms, with which he gestured imposingly. A large computer-generated head was projected onto the wall, occasionally moving its mouth, nodding or rotating. Meanwhile, a noise like an oboe getting sucked into a 1980s synthesiser engulfed the audience.

Stelarc directed these sounds and animations with his hands, using Microsoft?s Kinect. Initially designed for gaming, Kinect detects a player?s gestures with a depth-sensing camera and infrared scanner and uses it to move the player's avatar on screen. Stelarc and his team have tweaked the system so he can control the head and music. So, when Stelarc lifted and bent his right arm, it prompted the head to nod, for example. When he raised a hand, white noise assaulted my ears.

Stelarc was able to keep up with what the head is doing via LCD screens fitted into his visor. ?It allows to me interact with the head,? he told me after the performance.

But if Stelarc?s amplified head was meant to take us on a trip into uncanny valley, it failed to even reach the slopes. The problem was that the interaction he mentioned was just a one-way conversation directed by the artist. There was no question of who was in control, because the projected head had no power, nor did it look real enough to create the freaky sensation that Goodall discussed. Plus, the aural assault was unnecessarily punishing.

Perhaps if the head?s graphics were more realistic and some artificial intelligence allowed it to contribute to the performance I would have been intrigued. Better still, if the head had started to smile at the deafening musical creation, I might have really freaked out.

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Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/1aea1f14/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Cculturelab0C20A110C120Csevered0Eheads0Eline0Ethe0Eroute0Eto0Euncanny0Evalley0Bhtml0DDCMP0FOTC0Erss0Gnsref0Fonline0Enews/story01.htm

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