The Uncanny Valley, Interior-Design Edition
Greg Miller
The "uncanny valley" usually applies to human aesthetics. It describes that vague sense of revulsion you get when you see a fabricated person—a robot, usually—who looks aaaaalmost human … but not quite. So, for example, this lady. This dude. Anything displayed here. The "valley" refers to the emotional reactions humans have toward anthropomorphized machines, when those reactions are charted: It's the deep dip in comfort level we tend to experience, based on our finely honed survival instincts, when we humans come face-to-quasi-face with beings that are at once extremely like us and extremely not.I mention all that because of ... Seinfeld. Or, well, because of pseudo-Seinfeld. You know Oculus Rift, the virtual reality headset? Now there's a 3-D version of Jerry's apartment, created for the platform by the OR designer and Seinfeld fan Greg Miller. Which means, as On the Media put it: "Anyone with an OR headset can download his project and sit around pretending that they're talking about nothing."...MORE, including video.
