Virtual robots, including virtual animals, are expected to have a future impact within affective and aesthetic interfaces, serious games, video instruction, and the personalization of educational instruction. The actual impact depends much on how virtual characters are perceived by users and the uncanny valley theory has shown that the design of virtual characters can affect user experiences. This research explores whether the uncanny valley effect, which has already been found for the human-like appearance of virtual characters, can also be found for animal-like appearances.

The main questions: ● RQ1. Ranking Does the expert-based ranking of virtual animals lead to different uncanny valley effects than the participant-based ranking of virtual animals?

● RQ2. Movement Does movement of the virtual animals amplify the affinity responses (changes in familiarity, commonality, naturalness, attractiveness, interestingness, and animateness) compared to still images of the virtual animals?

● RQ3. Morbidity Does a morbid virtual animal (e.g., one with zombie features) elicit more negative familiarity, commonality, naturalness, attractiveness, interestingness, and animateness than other characters?

You can have access to experimental data in SPSS, videos of the survey II, and images used in the survey I and II.

Method: We conducted two studies through online surveys with six different designs, which were evaluated in terms of their familiarity, commonality, naturalness, attractiveness, interestingness, and animateness. In study I, experts ordered the six still images on animal-likeness, while for the still and moving images of study II, the participants were asked to order the images on animal-likeness. Universe: Study or survey I had 162 participants between 10 to 50 years old and from several continents: 1 from Africa, 15 from Asia, 126 from Europe, 5 from North America, and 15 from South America. Study or survey II had 163 participants between 10 to 60 years old and again from several continents: 8 from Asia, 2 from Asia/Europe, 73 from Europe, 1 from North America, and 79 from South America.