Is the Perceived Comfort With CG Characters Increasing With Their Novelty?

Realistic characters from movies and games can cause strangeness and involuntary feelings in viewers, an effect known as the uncanny valley (UV). This article revisits the central UV hypothesis, proposed by Masahiro Mori in 1970, to evaluate its impact on people's perception of characters created using computer graphics (CG). More precisely, our goal is to answer the following questions: 1) Are people feeling more comfortable with more recent CG characters than the older ones? 2) Does charisma or familiarity with virtual humans correlate with perceived comfort? To answer these questions, we first replicated an experiment from 2012 and compared the perception concerning CG characters then and now, and then we included images of more recent CG characters in our analysis. Our results indicate that the perceived comfort increased over time when comparing the characters of 2012 and 2020. However, it did not change significantly for the characters of 2012. In addition, we found a correlation between perceived charisma and familiarity, at all levels of realism, and between charisma and comfort. Interestingly, more charisma was perceived in videos than in images. In addition, unrealistic characters were also perceived as more charismatic.