Elmo loves a Big Budget!

From FarLeftSide.Com.

Elmo enters the "Uncanny Valley"

There is a theory in robotics that humans feel more and more empathy toward a robot, until it reaches a certain level of humanness and then suddenly the robot is not "empathetic" or "cute" but just creepy. It appears that Sesame Street has managed to deposit Elmo deep into the Uncanny Valley with their prototype for a new toy called "Elmo Live".