This summer, we're digging through our archives to bring you some O-TM pieces you might not have heard before.

For Summer Lessons No. 5, we go back to 2010 when our former colleague, Jamie York, took us on a journey to the uncanny valley.

In 2001, DreamWorks was paying approximately $60 million for an animated movie about a green

ogre named Shrek, and the animation brain trust tasked with making this $60 million investment

pay dividend was well in their way. Lovable, if grotesque, green ogre? Check. Donkey's

sidekick the cracks wise? Check. Fantastic world for everyone to inhabit? Check.

There was just one problem. In test screenings, the heroine, princess and motivating force

behind the movie was having a most unexpected effect. They were so good at doing what they

were doing with the princess character that when they showed it to audience of children, the children started crying and freaking out because there was something wrong.

That's Lawrence Westler, a longtime journalist who wrote about this incident for Wired Magazine.

It's true, the animators of Shrek were so good, so sophisticated, that they were scaring their intended audience. Why? Their princess had fallen into what's known as the Uncanny Valley. Which was this notion by a Japanese roboticist named Mashihiri Mori. The notion was that if you made a robot that was 50% lifelike, that was fantastic.

If you made a robot that was 90% lifelike, that was fantastic.

If you made it 95% lifelike, that was the best, that was so great.

If you made it 96% lifelike, it was a disaster.

And the reason essential is because a 95% lifelike robot is a robot that's incredibly lifelike.

A 96% lifelike robot is a human being with something wrong.

Morrie called it the Uncanny Valley, a play on Sigmund Freud's idea of the Uncanny, something familiar and yet foreign at the same time.

Science and Technology writer Clive Thompson.

More or less around the early 2000s, you started to get computer graphics inside games good

enough that the people looked very people-like and they were hitting that valley point because

you would look at them and you go, oh wow, that looks really realistic. And you'd get up close,

and you'd see the face and you'd realize that the skin wasn't quite moving the way it's supposed to move and the eyes look sort of fish-like. And it was just, ah! You know, I would just shriek and shriek like a little girl because this face looks so horrifyingly dead and dull. A computer-generated character climbs out of the valley when it finally looks and acts real.

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