Humanized version of the Nestlé Girl falls into the valley of strangeness

Condensed milk packaging Girl is something known to many Brazilians – with the design of the peasant, popularly called Nestle girl, being one of the great symbols of world marketing. To take advantage of the iconography, Nestlé announced for Brazil the launch of a humanized digital version of Moça da Nestlé, which generates discomfort for those who see it in a concept described as strangeness valley (from English Uncanny Valley), which we explain below. Check out.

The humanized Nestlé Girl

A Nestlé claims to have released the humanized version of Girl with the purpose of connecting even more with the public in the entire ecosystem of the brand, helping consumers in the culinary repertoire and reinforcing the importance of the brand's relationship, especially with women, being also an ambassador of sweet entrepreneurship. 

give life to Girl aims to evolve the connection with consumers, who even gave their name, being a partner in everyday life, bringing solutions and inspiration. After all, it's 100 years of history, learning together with Brazilian women.

Keila Broedel, Culinary Marketing Executive at Nestlé.

The new version of Girl was developed by Nestlé in partnership with Zero vector, a company with more than 35 years of experience in 3D animation, which transformed the brand's figure into a modern character with an ultra-realistic aesthetic with a contemporary costume, and still inspired by the original, using the tool to create and model the character metahumans, which allows the creation and customization of hyper-realistic human models from a library of assets

The new version of the character will appear mainly on social networks, presenting content and, as said by Keila Broedel, serving as a bridge for women to identify with the brand. Watch the character launch video:

Although the humanized form of the digital character of the Nestlé Girl was designed to be as realistic as possible, its expressions and movements denounce that it is a computer-animated figure, causing discomfort to the viewer. But why does this perception occur?

Why is it uncomfortable to see the Nestlé Girl?

Regardless of the purpose of Nestlé, looking at this new version of the Moça causes a sensation of estrangement popularly known as strangeness valley – a phenomenon described as the feeling of discomfort that a computer-generated figure with realistic features causes in people who observe it.

The term has its origins in the 1970s, in a thesis written by a researcher at the University of Tokyo called Masahiro Mori. He claims that as robot development progressed, people's response to watching the machines would become so empathetic that they would turn around and result in revulsion.

However, there is a gray area in this perception, as described by Mori, and even if a robot looks like a human, some of its movements and mannerisms could still be mechanical, thus causing a mixed feeling in the observer, a slight discomfort - the strangeness valley.

The actual cause of this sensation is still much debated, with researchers speculating that it could be anything from a response to an instinctive search for reproductive partners as well as an unconscious fear about death being evidenced by seeing a possible future surrogate - either way, these are all theories. that could not be proved, although studies continue to this day.

The valley of strangeness in our daily lives

The reality, however, is that the strangeness valley is something that is coming to the fore a lot in everyone's daily lives in 2022. Playing a newer video game, for example, like Medal of Honor: Warfighter, with extremely realistic 3D models but truncated movements and animations, the feeling is that we are looking at a window into the bizarre.

Some robots also cause this sensation, such as the CB2 Child Robot, who theoretically behaves like a child but in reality, with his expressionless eyes and mechanical movements, causes more of a sensation of observing something strange in front of him than to be simulating, in fact, a person in childhood.

In examples of more modern robots, we have Skirt, the receptionist robot, who has 27 muscles on her face that would allow her to make several different facial expressions – the reality, however, is that her programming does not allow her to have as good control of her muscles as we humans have , leading to rather gruesome faces.

Finally, we also cite the strangeness valley caused by the adaptation to the big screen of the musical Cats, 2019. In the theater, the play used costumes that gave the actors a cute look, to make them look like cats, while in the film adaptation the direction preferred to add the feline look by computer graphics, creating true furry freaks that behave and move like the actors, but have all the hallmarks of cats – as can be seen in the trailer above, the discomfort is enormous.

As a result, the humanized version of the Girl da Nestlé is another one of these examples – although one of the mildest, since the emotional response caused by it ends up not being as strong as some of the examples mentioned above. Furthermore, with the metaverse increasingly becoming a topic of conversation, more examples of these types of brand representations will appear – in the end, it’s good to keep in mind that the Uncanny Valley, at least for the next few years, will be part of most people's experience.

See also:

Android 13 is officially released by Google; see who gets the new version

Sources: Strange Dimensions, Spectrum.ieee, Collider