[As this story from The Guardian suggests, even simple chatbots can be very useful and are likely to become much more common; the presence-related research questions include to what degree and in what ways do users perceive and treat the bot as a social actor, and how do their perceptions impact their likelihood to use and be satisfied with their interactions? –Matthew]

Chatbot lawyer overturns 160,000 parking tickets in London and New York

Free service DoNotPay helps appeal over $4m in parking fines in just 21 months, but is just the tip of the legal AI iceberg for its 19-year-old creator

Samuel Gibbs
28 June 2016

An artificial-intelligence lawyer chatbot has successfully contested 160,000 parking tickets across London and New York for free, showing that chatbots can actually be useful.

Dubbed as “the world’s first robot lawyer” by its 19-year-old creator, London-born second-year Stanford University student Joshua Browder, DoNotPay helps users contest parking tickets in an easy to use chat-like interface.

The program first works out whether an appeal is possible through a series of simple questions, such as were there clearly visible parking signs, and then guides users through the appeals process.

The results speak for themselves. In the 21 months since the free service was launched in London and now New York, Browder says DoNotPay has taken on 250,000 cases and won 160,000, giving it a success rate of 64% appealing over $4m of parking tickets. Read more on Chatbot lawyer overturns 160,000 parking tickets, raises presence questions…

[This piece from Recode is an excellent, brief summary of the challenges, rewards and current status of the evolution of virtual reality, and particularly the central role of presence, short for telepresence and otherwise, in the success of the medium. –Matthew]

[Image: Experiencing Samsung Gear VR at the Samsung Creator’s Lounge At VidCon 2016. Jonathan Leibson / Getty]

Why virtual reality matters

As a new medium, VR is in a peculiar predicament: Hailed as a multibillion-dollar industry, it’s also still in its creative infancy.

by Jason Brush Jun 28, 2016

Once upon a time, every medium in our incomprehensibly vast modern media landscape — photography, recorded music and radio, cinema, TV, video games, the Wii — was once just somebody’s impossible dream, a laughable absurdity. Movies, at their inception, were hand-cranked carnival attractions, TV an expensive, blurry, furniture-sized indulgence.

Every medium that permeates our lives was once attacked as being, at best, impracticable or, at worst, immoral. Each succeeded solely because of dedicated advocates and acolytes who fought to prove the merit of what others said was folly. They saw past technical challenges, low fidelity and — perhaps most crucially — beyond the status quo’s preconceptions of what was possible in order to investigate the potential of something unproven.

As a new medium, virtual reality is in a peculiar predicament: Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Sony and others are making significant, high-profile investments in VR, with VR on center stage at their industry events and featured prominently in their company roadmaps; it’s regularly hailed as a new multibillion-dollar industry.

But at the same time, VR is in its creative infancy. There’s some remarkable content — just look at the amazing VR showcased at the Sundance and Tribeca film festivals — but VR content creators are really just in the early stages of understanding how the medium works. Not only is there no “blockbuster” VR piece yet, if you make an investment in a headset today, you’d be able to watch the majority of the best work in a weekend.

Because of this, VR faces many critics who decry it as a bubble waiting to burst. So, what makes VR a medium with potential? Why should consumers, brands, content producers and artists take a chance on its future?

Every popular medium was built upon its early advocates’ fervent belief in its unique potential. The early advocates of cinema saw its potential to bend time and transform space magically; the pioneers of recorded music saw the potential to immortalize sound, which was previously just ephemera. The early advocates of the web saw the potential to connect people to information and make it universally accessible. These are the reasons why those mediums mattered.

So, why does VR matter? Why is it so revolutionary?

The most common answer is presence: VR has the promise of making you feel present in another place, another time, or to have a perspective that you couldn’t have otherwise. This is perhaps why so many of the best VR experiences thus far have been documentary in nature, and why companies interested in telepresence, like Facebook, have invested in it so heavily. If presence is the defining attribute of VR as a medium, then the key to shaping meaningful, impactful VR experiences will be found in shaping presence. Read more on Why does virtual reality matter? Presence!…

[Microsoft’s vision for Windows as a standard operating system for virtual and augmented (mixed) reality has important implications. Here are two stories on this development: the first is from CNN Money, where the original features Microsoft’s 1:03 minute concept video, and the second is a big picture analysis from IT Business Edge that, among other things, identifies the origins of a presence-infused future in the Reeves and Nass-inspired ‘Bob’ product. –Matthew]

Microsoft unveils its new vision for Windows

by Hope King
June 1, 2016

Microsoft wants to do for virtual reality what it did for PCs: Make the emerging technology as ubiquitous as possible.

To do that, the company is trying to get its Windows Holographic platform into as many devices as possible, just like it did with Windows when personal computers first hit the market. (Think of Windows Holographic like a standard operating system for virtual reality and augmented reality.)

Microsoft presented its plans on Wednesday in Taipei during Computex, a consumer electronics trade show.

“Windows Holographic is coming to devices of all shapes and sizes from fully immersive virtual reality to fully untethered holographic computing,” Terry Myerson, head of Windows and devices, said in a statement. “[We’re looking ahead] to the future of computing, where the physical and virtual worlds intersect in all new ways, and create further scale for the Windows platform.” Read more on Microsoft’s vision of a presence future: The Windows Holographic OS…

[This story from New York Magazine describes the interesting ways Edward Snowden uses telepresence to interact with the world and how people in the world respond, as well as his views on the emergence of virtual reality. This is an abridged version of the long original, which includes several more images. –Matthew]

[Image: Attending “Astro Noise” at the Whitney. Photo: Henrik Moltke]

I, Snowden

For a man accused of espionage and effectively exiled in Russia, Edward Snowden is also, strangely, free.

By Andrew Rice
June 26, 2016

Edward Snowden lay on his back in the rear of a Ford Escape, hidden from view and momentarily unconscious, as I drove him to the Whitney museum one recent morning to meet some friends from the art world. Along West Street, clotted with traffic near the memorial pools of the World Trade Center, a computerized voice from my iPhone issued directions via the GPS satellites above. Snowden’s lawyer, Ben Wizner of the American Civil Liberties Union, was sitting shotgun, chattily recapping his client’s recent activities. For a fugitive wanted by the FBI for revealing classified spying programs who lives in an undisclosed location in Russia, Snowden was managing to maintain a rather busy schedule around Manhattan.

A couple nights earlier, at the New York Times building, Wizner had watched Snowden trounce Fareed Zakaria in a public debate over computer encryption. “He did Tribeca,” the lawyer added, referring to a surprise appearance at the film festival, where Snowden had drawn gasps as he crossed the stage at an event called the Disruptive Innovation Awards. Wizner stopped himself mid-sentence, laughing at the absurdity of his pronoun choice: “He!” Behind us, Snowden stared blankly upward, his face bouncing beneath a sheet of Bubble Wrap as the car rattled over the cobblestones of the Meatpacking District.

Snowden’s body might be confined to Moscow, but the former NSA computer specialist has hacked a work-around: a robot. If he wants to make his physical presence felt in the United States, he can connect to a wheeled contraption called a BeamPro, a flat-screen monitor that stands atop a pair of legs, five-foot-two in all, with a camera that acts as a swiveling Cyclops eye. Inevitably, people call it the “Snowbot.” The avatar resides at the Manhattan offices of the ACLU, where it takes meetings and occasionally travels to speaking engagements. (You can Google pictures of the Snowbot posing with Sergey Brin at TED.) Undeniably, it’s a gimmick: a tool in the campaign to advance Snowden’s cause — and his case for clemency — by building his cultural and intellectual celebrity. But the technology is of real symbolic and practical use to Snowden, who hopes to prove that the internet can overcome the power of governments, the strictures of exile, and isolation. It all amounts to an unprecedented act of defiance, a genuine enemy of the state carousing in plain view. Read more on Edward Snowden’s strangely free life – As a robot…

[For VR and the presence experiences it creates to evolve, we need to figure out how to tell compelling stories in the new medium; production designer and founder of Virtual Reality Company Robert Stromberg provides insights about where we are and where we need to go in this story from Engadget (where it includes more images). –Matthew]

[Image: A still from “The Martian VR Experience” (Image credit: Virtual Reality Company)]

The struggle to adapt storytelling for virtual reality

“We’re ready to tell stories but how do you do that in VR?” asks Oscar-winning art director Robert Stromberg.

Mona Lalwani
June 23, 2016

Storytelling in virtual reality has yet to take shape. While the simulated world of gaming has proved the visual capabilities of the medium, few have taken a crack at the art of building a compelling narrative.

But now that the battle of the VR headsets is fully under way, a shift is evident. Content studios seem to be getting ready for the next wave of virtual reality. Over the past week alone, major VR studios have announced investments from Hollywood studios that seem indicative of the cinematic experiences to come. Within, formerly known as VRSE, has raised $12.56 million from investors including Andreessen Horowitz and 21st Century Fox, Felix & Paul Studios has seen $6.8 million in a round led by Comcast, and Virtual Reality Company (VRC) got $23 million from Beijing’s Hengxin Mobile Business in exchange for exclusive distribution rights in China.

There’s been a lot of hype and cash flow around VR in the past couple of years. But there’s little insight into what it takes to build a great experience outside gaming. Can filmmakers turn into VR makers? Will they infuse this immersive format with dramatic storytelling? Or will it remain a simulated world that’s best suited for interactive gaming?

The experience that came closest to immersive cinema was VRC’s The Martian VR Experience at the beginning of the year. It followed director Ridley Scott’s visual cues, but unlike other Hollywood companion pieces that came before, this one took on a life of its own. It gave VR headset wearers the ability to inhabit the film as Mark Watney (the abandoned astronaut played by Matt Damon). The isolation of being stranded and the triumph of being rescued in space made for a powerful experience.

The Martian VR epitomized the dramatic capabilities of the visual medium. Oscar-winning production designer and VRC founder Robert Stromberg infused the experience with a narrative and emotions in a way that hadn’t been successful before. His ability to build the cinematic experience stemmed from his award-winning career in Hollywood.

For well over a decade, Stromberg has been a VFX specialist who has worked with some of the biggest names in Hollywood, including Steven Soderbergh, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg. His list of accolades for production design and visual effects includes five Emmys (including Star Trek: The Next Generation and Boardwalk Empire) and two Academy Awards (for James Cameron’s Avatar and Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland). Last year he also won three Cannes Lions for What Lives Inside, an Intel- and Dell- sponsored series that premiered on Hulu.

In light of the new funding for VRC and the buzz around Steven Spielberg’s VR debut with the company that he backs as an adviser, I spoke with Stromberg about what it takes to build compelling narratives in an immersive format. Read more on The struggle to adapt storytelling for virtual reality…