ISPR Presence News

Monthly Archives: December 2016

Call: CHI 2017 Workshop on Designing Speech, Acoustic, and Multimodal Interactions (DSLI 2017)

CHI 2017 Workshop on Designing Speech, Acoustic, and Multimodal Interactions (DSLI 2017)
Sunday, May 7, 2017
Colorado Convention Center, Denver, CO (USA)
http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/dsli2017/

Call for position papers

  • January 25th, 2017: Submission of position papers
  • February 8th, 2017: Notification of acceptance
  • February 22nd, 2017: Camera-ready submissions

Traditional interfaces are continuously being replaced by mobile, wearable, or pervasive interfaces. Yet when it comes to the input and output modalities enabling our interactions, we have yet to fully embrace some of the most natural forms of communication and information processing that humans possess: speech, language, gestures, thoughts. Very little HCI attention has been dedicated to designing and developing spoken language, acoustic-based, or multimodal interaction techniques, especially for mobile and wearable devices. In addition to the enormous, recent engineering progress in processing such modalities, there is now sufficient evidence that many real-life applications do not require 100% accuracy of processing multimodal input to be useful, particularly if such modalities complement each other.… read more. “Call: CHI 2017 Workshop on Designing Speech, Acoustic, and Multimodal Interactions (DSLI 2017)”

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VR ‘Joy’ experience to alleviate loneliness, isolation for Australia hospital patients

[Although this story from ZDNet doesn’t mention it, much of the press coverage of the new use of VR (and presence) to ease the loneliness of patients in Australia hospitals notes that it should be especially valuable during the holiday season, so it seems like a good story for our last post before Christmas. A 1:27 minute video about the project is available on YouTube and a press release is available from MediaBank. –Matthew]

 

[Image: Source: Liminal]

Medibank launches VR for Australian hospitals on Google Daydream View

Virtual reality developer Liminal’s ‘Joy’ experience will alleviate loneliness and isolation for long-stay hospital patients across Australia.

By Jonathan Chadwick
December 3, 2016

Australian health insurer Medibank has launched an immersive virtual reality (VR) experience for Australian hospitals on Google Daydream View, in collaboration with a group of neuropsychologists at Melbourne-based VR developers Liminal.… read more. “VR ‘Joy’ experience to alleviate loneliness, isolation for Australia hospital patients”

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Call: VRIC 2017 – 19th ACM Virtual Reality International Conference

CALL FOR PAPERS

VRIC 2017
19TH ACM VIRTUAL REALITY INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
Laval (France), March 22 – 24, 2017
http://www.laval-virtual.org/en/scientific-conferences/vric/vric-2017.html

Sponsored by ACM
Logistics partner: Laval Virtual

 

Partnership with international journals for special issues: IJVR & JVRB

The annual VRIC – Laval Virtual conference is a global forum for researchers and engineers from industry, academia and research institutes to discuss and exchange ideas, methods and results on Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Internet of Things uses and technologies. The scope of the conference covers a variety of topics ranging from theoretical developments to industrial applications and case studies.

IMPORTANT DATES

Submission Deadline: January 6, 2017
Acceptance of papers: February 6, 2017
Final Paper Submission and Registration: March 6, 2017

All accepted papers will be published on ACM Digital Library (http://dl.acm.org/)

ACM VRIC 2017 seeks original, high‐quality short papers (4 pages) or poster papers (2 pages) in all areas related to virtual reality (VR), including augmented reality (AR), and 3D user interfaces.… read more. “Call: VRIC 2017 – 19th ACM Virtual Reality International Conference”

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Robot babies from Japan raise all sorts of questions about how parents bond with AI

[This piece from The Conversation (reprinted this month in Quartz) provides an overview of just some of the fascinating practical and ethical issues related to medium-as-social-actor presence; the original versions include two videos. –Matthew]

[Image: Mommy? Toyota’s Kirobo Mini robot (Reuters/Kim Kyung-Hoon)]

Robot babies from Japan raise all sorts of questions about how parents bond with AI

October 17, 2016
Mark Robert Anderson, Professor in Computing and Information Systems, Edge Hill University

Driven by a declining population, a trend for developing robotic babies has emerged in Japan as a means of encouraging couples to become “parents”. The approaches taken vary widely and are driven by different philosophical approaches that also beg a number of questions, not least whether these robo-tots will achieve the aim of their creators.

To understand all of this it is worth exploring the reasons behind the need to promote population growth in Japan.… read more. “Robot babies from Japan raise all sorts of questions about how parents bond with AI”

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Call: Communities and Technologies (C&T) 2017 Conference: Technology for the Common Good

C&T 2017 – Communities and Technologies (C&T) Conference: Technology for the Common Good
26-30 June 2017, Université de Technologie de Troyes, France
http://comtech.community/

Deadline for papers (full and short), workshop proposals and case studies: February 1, 2017

ABOUT C&T

The biennial Communities and Technologies (C&T) conference is the premier international forum for stimulating scholarly debate and disseminating research on the complex connections between communities – both physical and virtual – and information and communication technologies.

C&T 2017 welcomes participation from researchers, designers, educators, industry, and students from the many disciplines and perspectives bearing on the interaction between community and technology, including architecture, arts, business, design, economics, education, engineering, ergonomics, informatics, information technology, geography, health, humanities, law, media and communication studies, and social sciences.… read more. “Call: Communities and Technologies (C&T) 2017 Conference: Technology for the Common Good”

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New York to juice its VR/AR industry with splashy new Lab

[This development is another sign of the growing importance of presence-evoking technologies; the story is from Fortune. –Matthew]

[Image: A journalist uses Google’s Daydream VR headset during an event to introduce Google hardware products on October 4, 2016 in San Francisco, California. Credit: Ramin Talaie – Getty Images]

New York Is Planning to Juice Its VR Industry With a Splashy New Lab

To spur job growth in virtual reality and augmented reality startups

By Lisa Eadicicco
December 14, 2016

Companies like Facebook, Google, and Microsoft have spent years proclaiming that technologies like virtual and augmented reality represent the future of how we live and work. While teachers and doctors are already experimenting with such technology, VR and AR devices still have a ways to go before they’re as ubiquitous as smartphones and tablets.

Local organizations in New York City are hoping to accelerate that process.… read more. “New York to juice its VR/AR industry with splashy new Lab”

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Call: British HCI 2017

Call for Papers

British HCI 2017
3-6 July, 2017
University of Sunderland’s St. Peter’s Campus

Full and short papers deadline: March 8, 2017

The 31st British Human Computer Interaction Conference will be held from the 3rd to the 6th of July, 2017, at the University of Sunderland’s St. Peter’s Campus. The conference is organised by the HCI research groups at the University of Sunderland and Edinburgh Napier University in conjunction with the Interaction Specialist Group of the British Computer Society.

The BCS HCI 2017 conference theme is Digital Make-Believe. Make-believe refers to our expansive, “what-if” thinking, ubiquitous in HCI. For example, we make-believe when we design innovative technology, we make-believe when immersing ourselves in a computer game or virtual world and we make-believe when evaluating and refining new technology by imagining ourselves using it.

At HCI 2017 (http://hci2017.bcs.org/read more. “Call: British HCI 2017”

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We have virtual reality. What’s next is straight out of ‘The Matrix’

[I’ve removed the more familiar review of VR’s past and present from this long story from Digital Trends (which features videos and more images) to focus on the part that forecasts the far and near future of VR and presence. –Matthew]

We have virtual reality. What’s next is straight out of ‘The Matrix’

By Nick Mokey — December 19, 2016

[snip]

A kid born in 1999 is just now old enough to rent the R-rated Matrix — or more likely, stream it. Yet in those intervening 17 years, entering the Matrix has gone from a dystopian sci-fi dream to a waking reality. These days, a pair of $800 goggles can convince you to duck as dinosaurs shamble over you, drop the pit of your stomach as you peer off the ledge of an artificial skyscraper, and make you puke — in real life — after one too many loops in a computer-generated space fighter.… read more. “We have virtual reality. What’s next is straight out of ‘The Matrix’”

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Call: ICMI 2017, the 19th International Conference on Multimodal Interaction

Call for Long and Short Papers

ICMI 2017, 19th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction
Glasgow, Scotland
November 13-17th, 2017

Full details including Calls for Demos, Grand Challenges, Workshops and Doctoral Consortium can be found at https://icmi.acm.org/2017

Upcoming Submission Deadlines

  • Grand Challenge proposal due on January 13th 2017
  • Workshop proposals on February 22nd 2017
  • Long and short papers on May 12th 2017 (11:59pm GMT)

The 19th International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2017) will be held in Glasgow, Scotland. ICMI is the premier international forum for multidisciplinary research on multimodal human-human and human-computer interaction, interfaces, and system development. The conference focuses on theoretical and empirical foundations, component technologies, and combined multimodal processing techniques that define the field of multimodal interaction analysis, interface design, and system development.

This year, ICMI welcomes contributions on machine learning for multimodal interaction as a special topic of interest.… read more. “Call: ICMI 2017, the 19th International Conference on Multimodal Interaction”

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VR gets social with Oculus Rooms and Parties

[The introduction of Oculus Rooms and Parties described in this story from Engadget (which features more images) could be a big step toward social presence in VR; the Oculus blog post about the features says “The first wave of VR was all about the magic of presence, the immersive sense of actually being inside a virtual space. The next step is to let you feel that same sense of presence with other people in VR.” –Matthew]

Gear VR gets social with Oculus Rooms and Parties

Rift users will get these features in 2017.

Nicole Lee
December 16, 2016

A few months ago at Oculus’ annual developer conference, the company announced a couple of social VR features known simply as Parties and Rooms. Parties is basically built-in voice chat, while Rooms is a virtual hangout space. Today, those features are finally live, at least for the Gear VR; Rift users will have to wait until 2017.… read more. “VR gets social with Oculus Rooms and Parties”

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