[Most presence experiences are meant to be positive, or at least neutral; this one is purposely unpleasant. Unfortunately I know well that not replicating the pain of a migraine means the presence experience is a limited replication, but it can still be quite useful. Both stories below are from the New York Daily News; the first one features Excedrin’s 2:07 minute video and additional pictures. Excedrin’s press release is available via PR Newswire. And coverage by Chip Chick provides this detail: “Excedrin had a custom rig drawn up that combines augmented reality and virtual reality to get people to see what their lives would be like if they were suddenly hit with a migraine. When strapped into VR, users will still be able to see the real world around them, but with migraine goggles on. Usually with augmented reality, the augmented field of vision is narrow — this rig uses VR head tracking to turn augmented reality into a full, 360-degree experience.”… read more. “Excedrin ‘Migraine Experience’ lets non-sufferers ‘see’ what debilitating headaches feel like”

[Reading an analysis of an issue or description of an experience is fundamentally different than the VR-evoked sense of having the experience. This first-person report of a VR simulation of harassment at a Planned Parenthood clinic is from Broadly; a link to a 7:12 minute navigable video version is provided at the end below. For an interview with Dawn Laguens, executive producer of Across the Line and executive vice president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and Nonny de la Peña, co-creator of Across the Line, see coverage from Democracy Now. –Matthew]

Planned Parenthood’s New Virtual Reality Video Simulates Clinic Harassment

Using actual recorded audio and video taken from outside their clinics, Planned Parenthood has produced an immersive virtual reality experience that puts you on scene as anti-abortion extremists try to intimidate patients seeking services.

by Tanja M.… read more. “Planned Parenthood’s new VR experience simulates clinic harassment”

[The evolution of AI and related technologies is raising new and interesting challenges for the designers of virtual assistants – to evoke the most effective presence responses, should the assistants be just functional or emotionally connect with users? How closely should they mimic human behavior? This story is from The Washington Post, where it features an additional image. –Matthew]

[Image: Redmond, WASH. – A meeting of Microsoft Cortana’s writing team – which includes a poet, a novelist, a playwright, and a former tv writer. Leading the meeting is Deborah Harrison, Senior Content Developer, who talks with Chris O’Connor, also a Senior Content Developer, to her left. Across the table is August Niehaus, a writer for the team (Photo by Stuart Isett for The Washington Post)]

The next hot job in Silicon Valley is for poets

By Elizabeth Dwoskin
April 7, 2016

SAN FRANCISCO — Until recently, Robyn Ewing was a writer in Hollywood, developing TV scripts and pitching pilots to film studios.… read more. “Challenges in designing the personalities of virtual assistants”

[The idea, and the last sentence here, are unsettling, but this story from Scientific American considers the fascinating prospect that we and everything and everyone we know is a simulation designed as a presence illusion. For more on this topic, see (Tele)Presence and Simulation: Questions of Epistemology, Religion, Morality, and Mortality (pdf) by Jones, Lombard and Jasak. –Matthew]

[Image: A scene from the film The Thirteenth Floor (IMDb entry). Source: The Ghost Diaries.]

Are We Living in a Computer Simulation?

High-profile physicists and philosophers gathered to debate whether we are real or virtual—and what it means either way

By Clara Moskowitz on April 7, 2016

NEW YORK—If you, me and every person and thing in the cosmos were actually characters in some giant computer game, we would not necessarily know it. The idea that the universe is a simulation sounds more like the plot of “The Matrix,” but it is also a legitimate scientific hypothesis.… read more. “The ultimate presence illusion: Experts debate whether we are real or virtual”

[This story from MIT Technology Review raises interesting questions about the role of olfaction in perception and presence, and about how to test the effectiveness of artificially-generated odors. Follow the link at the end for the new article by David Harel. –Matthew]

Turing Tests and the Problem of Artificial Olfaction

Unlike sight and sound, smells have never been accurately reproduced. Now one researcher has begun to think seriously about how artificial olfaction might work.

by Emerging Technology from the arXiv
April 7, 2016

Here’s an interesting problem. When it comes to human senses, we’ve found ways to reproduce the look and sound of the real world reasonably accurately. There are even technologies for reproducing the feel of certain experiences, such as flight and car simulators.

But the problem of reproducing smell is much more intractable. The 1960 SmelloVision experiment is a case in point.… read more. “Reproducing odors for presence: A Turing Test for artificial olfaction”