ANSWER
The "uncanny valley" is where the creepy humanoid robots live, so to speak...
The phrase "the uncanny valley" was coined by Doctor Masahiro Mori, a Japanese roboticist, to describe how humans react to robots as the robots become more human looking. Generally, people have a favorable emotional response to robots roughly in proportion to how closely the robots resemble humans. To a point. Everything is fine as long as the robots have human features, but are clearly not human. Once robots reach the point where they are nearly human, but not quite, they become creepy. The same thing can happen with dolls (or with various members of the Jackson family). They look human on the surface, but something in the back of our minds tells us that they just aren't quite right. And that gives us the impression that they are evil, creepy, spooky, living undead, etc. That is the uncanny valley.
On the other side of the uncanny valley the human emotional response jumps back up to the favorable side as robots become virtually indistinguishable from humans. But to achieve this response, everything about the robot has to be just right: looks, motion, speech etc. If any one aspect is a little off, the robot would slip back down into the depths of the uncanny valley.
Illustration courtesy of Dave Bryant (http://www.arclight.net/~pdb/glimpses/valley.html)
WHO GOT IT RIGHT: JP Weigt, Andie J, Bob Milligan, Trish Boggs, Matthew Toups, Iron Saul, Allan Christensen, Marc Quinlivan, Brian Bement, Corey Tracey, Ruud Oosterwijk, and Ryan Scannell.
