"The "Uncanny Valley" effect occurs when something approaches near human, but is a little off. The vast majority of characters in Alpha and Omega are nowhere near human, so do not fall into the terrain of the Uncanny Valley."
To some extent I think you're splitting hairs. When you're talking about empathy with anthropomorphic characters, the issue is how closely they fit our image of "human".
On the other hand, the Uncanny Valley* is specific about relation to *realistic* depictions, so you're right in that sense.
* Capitalized by tradition, really. It's actually a translation of a Japanese phrase used by Masahiro Mori in his seminal 1970 paper on the subject. It should properly be in quotes, but that's unwieldy. Eh, you're probably right... it could be lower-cased at this point.
To some extent I think you're splitting hairs. When you're talking about empathy with anthropomorphic characters, the issue is how closely they fit our image of "human".
On the other hand, the Uncanny Valley* is specific about relation to *realistic* depictions, so you're right in that sense.
On the other other hand, language changes! :)
By the way, I wrote an article on this subject for the Association for Computing Machinery -- see http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/MCG.2008.79 . I can send it to you privately: Contact me at howling -at- tgeller dot etcetera.
* Capitalized by tradition, really. It's actually a translation of a Japanese phrase used by Masahiro Mori in his seminal 1970 paper on the subject. It should properly be in quotes, but that's unwieldy. Eh, you're probably right... it could be lower-cased at this point.