Technologies

‘You have to distance yourself from it being a human’: Meeting Ameca the humanoid

Yea, though I walk through the uncanny valley, I will fear no evil.

This story is part of CES, where CNET covers the latest news on the most incredible tech coming soon.

There’s something distinctly unsettling about planning your first meeting with a robot.

At CES 2022, I had the chance to interview Ameca the robot during a one-on-one demonstration with its creators. I wanted to know if this humanoid was actually real. I wanted to see if its facial expressions were as realistic (and haunting) as they were in the videos I’d seen online. But mostly I wanted to know how the robot would respond to my questions. Should I prep a Voight-Kampff test, just to be sure?

It turns out I needn’t have worried about feeling disturbed by Ameca’s spoken responses. They were no more troublesome than what I get from Alexa. But the face Ameca made when its creator tried to poke it in the face? That will stay with me for a long time.

If you’re on the internet, you’ve probably seen Ameca. The gray-faced, humanoid robot blinked its way into the public consciousness in late 2021 when a video of its facial expressions went viral on social media. Elon Musk responded to the video with one word, «Yikes.» Chrissy Teigen retweeted it to her 13 million followers with four words: «absolutely. the fuck. not.»

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But while Ameca had some people running for the hills, its creators at UK company Engineered Arts were delighted.

«We were incredibly surprised,» says Morgan Roe, Engineered Arts’ director of operations. «Overnight, it became a sensation. We got 24 million views on one Twitter post.»

Roe puts it down to Ameca’s not-quite-robot, not-quite-human appearance. Its body is all metal and plastic, its face is a deliberately genderless and nonhuman gray. It has 17 individual motors inside its head controlling its movements and expressions. But its facial features are surprisingly vivid and emotive. And it’s this combination of artificial and lifelike that Roe says speaks to our collective vision of what humanoid robots will look like in the future.

«We’ve all seen it in the movies, we’ve all seen iRobot and A.I. Artificial Intelligence,» he says. «And suddenly, that’s real.»

Roe is speaking to me via Zoom from the show floor of CES, where Ameca is being shown to crowds, in the latex flesh, for the first time. Even though I’m seeing Roe and his robot over a Zoom call, it’s hard to shake just how real Ameca looks. I find myself distracted. I’m no longer speaking to the very friendly human Englishman I’m supposed to be interviewing. My eyes are straying over to Ameca’s face to see how it’s responding to our conversation. A furrowed eyebrow ridge, the twitch of a smile. Ameca isn’t human, and yet…

This isn’t the first hauntingly humanoid robot Engineered Arts has released. For the past four years, the company has been creating a line of lifelike Mesmer robots and showing them to conferencegoers on crowded show floors.

«Each Mesmer robot is designed and built from 3D in-house scans of real people, allowing us to imitate human bone structure, skin texture and expressions convincingly,» the Engineered Arts website tells prospective clients. «Mesmer is designed to be modular, so you can remove the head with one click and no tools, and swap it for another.»

Princess Mombi, eat your heart out.

Ameca isn’t destined for the conference circuit. It doesn’t run and jump like the robots created by Boston Dynamics, and it’s not something you can preorder now as a household helper. Roe says it’ll be at least 10 years before a robot like Ameca is «walking amongst us» as a service robot. Sure, Walking Among Us sounds like the title of the documentary that’ll eventually chronicle the decline of humanity, but we’ve got another decade before we need to worry about that.

Ameca also doesn’t have Mesmer’s flesh-colored skin tones. In place of the lifelike human hair on Mesmer’s head, Ameca has a translucent plastic skull. We see the robot’s joints and parts. Ameca is still undoubtedly «other,» and that’s deliberate.

«What we found was, when you try and make it look ultra lifelike [like] our other Mesmer line, it looks a bit more sinister, because it’s right in the uncanny valley,» Roe says. «But when we created Ameca, we pulled it backwards out of the uncanny valley.»

Of course, as Roe is saying these things to me over our Zoom call, Ameca is responding. Raising its eyebrows at people walking past. Subtly moving its lips (or, more accurately, the actuators around its mouth hole) as though trying to ape the speech of its human creator.

«Because it looks less human…» says Roe, while Ameca smiles into the middle distance.

«Because it’s plastic, because it’s metal…» says Roe, Ameca glancing over at him with a vague smile.

«Because it’s of gray skin, it’s suddenly…» Roe waves his hand near Ameca’s face and the robot leans back, startled.

«Ooh, hello,» says Roe, making eye contact with the humanoid and leaning back in startled unison. He’s lost his train of thought.

«It’s suddenly, uh, less — less scary.»

I’m struck with the urge to ask the question I’ve been thinking all along. The question I’ve wanted to ask since I first saw the video of Ameca in the lab, with its engineer/programmer hunched over a laptop and another identical Ameca moving slowly in the background.

«When you’re in your offices, working late into the night on some extra lines of code, do you ever do a double take or have to check behind you, at the robot, to see if it winked at you?» I ask.

«Actually no,» says Roe. «When you’re working with it day to day, it’s suddenly, definitely a robot. And a lot of the time, you’ll see one of the engineers walking through the workshop, not with a robot, with just the head. And you have to distance yourself from it being a human. Otherwise, then it’s really sinister.»

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WWE 2K25 Jumps From the Top Rope Onto PlayStation Plus in September

Subscribers will also be able to play a turn-based strategy Persona game.

«The American Nightmare» Cody Rhodes, son of one of the greatest pro wrestlers of all time, «The American Dream» Dusty Rhodes, is the current undisputed WWE champion. And PlayStation Plus subscribers can bring Rhodes down a peg or help establish a new wrestling dynasty with the champion beginning on Sept. 16 in WWE 2K25.

PlayStation Plus is Sony’s version of Xbox Game Pass, and it offers subscribers a large and constantly expanding library of games. There are three PlayStation Plus tiers — Essential ($10 a month), Extra ($15 a month) and Premium ($18 a month) — and each gives subscribers access to games. However, only Extra and Premium tier subscribers can access the PlayStation Plus Game Catalog.

Here are all the games PS Plus Extra and Premium subscribers can access starting on Sept. 16. You can also check out the games all PS Plus subscribers can play in September, including Psychonauts 2.

Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source.

WWE 2K25

Take control of your favorite superstar from the men’s and women’s divisions in this knockdown, dragout wrestling game. Become one of over 300 wrestlers from today and years past, like Rhea Ripley and Andre the Giant. This entry in the series also introduces intergender wrestling matches, barricade diving and new brawl environments where you can get over or turn heel.

Persona 5 Tactica

Join the Phantom Thieves in this real-time strategy game set in the Persona universe. You and the group wander into a bizarre realm where people are living under tyrannical oppression, and you cross paths with a revolutionary named Erina. Now you’re in cahoots with the rebels as you try to free an oppressed people and find your way back home.

Other games on PS Plus

Those are a few of the games Sony is bringing to PlayStation Plus, and subscribers can play these games as well starting on Sept. 16.

*Premium subscribers only.

For more on PlayStation Plus, here’s what to know about the service and a rundown of PS Plus Extra and Premium games added in August. You can also check out the latest and upcoming games on Xbox Game Pass and Apple Arcade.

Technologies

Little Nightmares 3 Hands-On: a Creepy Co-Op Game Arriving Just in Time for Halloween

The sequel adds cooperative play with all the haunting hallmarks of the earlier games.

After about an hour playing Little Nightmares 3, I’d used a person’s bisected halves to solve a puzzle, gotten a high score in a carnival shooting game and escaped the murderous claws of a deranged baby. As a 2-foot-tall youth trying to survive the morbid dangers of one demented area after another with my co-player, I was terrified and delighted.

I’ve only sampled the first two Little Nightmares games, but in my brief preview of Little Nightmares 3, it felt like a refined version of the series’ premise: small protagonists endangered by a large, grim world filled with traps to evade, puzzles to solve and horrid, lethal enemies to outwit. Take the scale of the animated horror movie 9, mix it with the darkest of stop-motion director Henry Selick’s maudlin settings and let players enjoy the haunting ride, room by perilous room.

This time, players aren’t alone. In Little Nightmares 3, developed by Supermassive Games, two players (or one and an AI companion) choose between characters Low (a bird-masked boy with a bow) and Alone (a girl with a jumpsuit and a wrench), who rely on each other and get out of rooms using their unique tools or just good ol’ fashioned teamwork. Sometimes this means pushing a box for the other to jump on, but other obstacles require rather complex puzzle-solving.

In the game, Low and Alone seek to escape the bleak Nowhere and its roulette of dystopian lands. My preview was limited to one of these areas — Carnevale, a demented circus where our small characters had to sneak under the feet of grotesque, ambling workers (or their corpses, tied up or swinging for the sport of their fellows). When we thought we were safe, possessed puppets sprinted after us until we could team up to knock their wooden heads off and crush them. Being noticed by anyone meant our demise, requiring frantic cooperation amid the anxious stakes of rather gruesome deaths.

It’s this tension and the dour setting that sets Little Nightmares 3 apart from other co-op games like the more excitable and dynamic Split Fiction released earlier this year, a rollercoaster flipbook of game genres that made for a breathless if not terribly coherent experience. In contrast, the section of Little Nightmares 3 I played unfolded like a series of grim vignettes that rely on its pleasingly goth trappings as much as working together with your friend (or computer teammate) to progress.

Surviving your little nightmares

While I got only an hour with the game, Little Nightmares 3 seems to iterate on rather than innovate away from its predecessors: Expect more of the same in new, grotesque settings, just with the welcome addition of tightly designed teamwork dynamics. For fans of the series, this is likely a good thing. There’s not much else like Little Nightmares.

The Carnevale stage I played through opened up with rain pelting red-and-white circus tent tops, which I as the masked Low (and someone from Bandai Namco who kindly played as the jumpsuit-wearing Alone) skittered between. Lumbering above us were brutish factory workers seeking escape at the funfair, which very quickly turned sinister as we very shortly saw some hanging tied-up as others took turns beating them like a piñata. We entered one room to find one worker in connected boxes as the subject of a magician’s saw-in-half trick…which was no trick, as we had to separate the halves to climb out of a window. I tried, and failed, to ignore the viscera slopping out of the boxes.

While we hid from the human-size enemies, we had to fight the wooden puppets. Like Geppeto’s most horrid creations, they ambushed us in several rooms, requiring me to knock their heads off with Low’s bow and run away from their decapitated bodies while my teammate rushed forward to crush their heads with Alone’s wrench.

But most of the rooms are about solving puzzles, which could be as simple as moving a box for my teammate to jump up and pull a switch or figure out how a radio plays into a complex solution. While these quiet moments are a nice break from the tense combat or pursuit, they also give time to appreciate the macabre backgrounds: I ran past one room with a circle of empty tall chairs only to come back a few seconds later to find them filled with puppets, unmoving but watching.

And then there are the really, really tense moments. We moved from the carnival to the adjoining candy factory (apparently where all those brutes work) and up to the offices where the boss works, to find him asleep with the TV droning on in the darkness…and his frankly hideous baby nestled next to him. Naturally, we had to make noise, cranking open a grate, awakening the terrifying spawn who ran after us. After many, many failed escapes, my teammate and I discovered we had to scramble for a hiding place after making it past the grate.

This was perhaps the most frustrating part of the preview as we panicked looking for a solution to our deadly woes (as opposed to the slow, methodical gameplay earlier) — but that’s part of the tension, especially when adding a teammate to the mix. Ultimately, it was a hard-won lesson in patience. In the next room, a kitchen, the nightmarish baby banged a bowl on the table until the father walked over to a corpse (presumably his worker) and cut out some meat for his ghoulish child to eat.

In my short time with it, Little Nightmares 3 seems like a cooperative spooky storybook for players and their friends (but not couch buddies, sadly — it’s online co-op only) to experience. How much it lives up to previous games in the series, especially as developer Supermassive Games takes more of the reins from the franchise’s original creators Tarsier Games, is anyone’s guess. (Tarsier’s similar spiritual sequel to Little Nightmares, Reanimal, is coming in 2026.)

But as the air turns crisp and Halloween beckons, it’s the best time of the year for a creepy co-op game like Little Nightmares 3 to land.

Little Nightmares 3 comes out Oct.10, 2025, for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2.