Playing in the Uncanny Valley

I heard a little story on NPR last Friday about the "uncanny valley". More on that in a second, but it made me realize that we're starting to play with the uncanny a lot in rehearsal. Here's a bit from wikipedia on the theory of the uncanny...

The Uncanny (Ger. Das Unheimliche -- literally, "un-home-ly") is a Freudian concept of an instance where something can be familiar, yet foreign at the same time, resulting in a feeling of it being uncomfortably strange.

Because the uncanny is familiar, yet strange, it often creates cognitive dissonance within the experiencing subject due to the paradoxical nature of being attracted to, yet repulsed by an object at the same time. This cognitive dissonance often leads to an outright rejection of the object, as one would rather reject than rationalize.

The uncanny valley is a robotics theory that says that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. There's a certain point around 96% human-like that freaks people out. See the chart below. Is this something we can play with?