[Northeastern University researchers have created and are testing a new game that uses the player’s facial expressions not to trigger simple changes in aesthetics or difficulty but as a mechanism for playing the game: “The emotional input you’re asked to provide further boosts the sense of ‘dramatic agency’ and makes you feel like a participant.” The ultimate goal is to build “emotional perspective-taking” and empathy, in this case for members of the LGBTQ+ community. The approach has great potential not only for VR games but in other contexts, as explained at the end of the story. See the original version…

[The use of presence-evoking virtual reality for taekwondo is the basis for “a growing community of the gamified combat sport across Southeast Asia.” This story from AP News provides details, including some of the motivations for and benefits of virtual taekwondo; see the original version of the story for eight more large and vivid images and a 52 second video. –Matthew] [Image: Virtual Taekwondo athletes compete at an event in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Saturday, June 20, 2026. Credit: AP Photo/Vincent Thian] VR and gaming are adding a kick to taekwondo By Eileen NgJuly 7, 2026 KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) —…

[The news that AI-generated actress Tilly Norwood will star in a feature film (as an AI-generated character) is receiving wide coverage in the press, including this report from Variety. Following that below I’ve added presence-related excerpts from a few stories in other publications, and from a recent interview with the Tilly Norwood in the New York Times Magazine (the interviewer gives an insightful assessment of why the actress evokes her medium-as-social-actor presence). –Matthew] Tilly Norwood to Lead New Movie ‘Misaligned,’ Marking Feature Debut for AI ‘Actor’ By Alex RitmanJuly 6, 2026 Tilly Norwood, the AI “actor” who sparked a frenzy…

[High-end technologies designed to evoke spatial and social presence have come a long way in the last few decades, as can be seen in this story from AV Magazine about the latest products from the company Noro. See the original version of the story for two more pictures, follow the links at the end for videos of the latest tech, and for more details visit the Noro website. –Matthew] Is Tommaso Trionfi taking the next turn in telepresence? The CEO of Noro and his team are combining an LED wall with an embedded central camera, companion touchscreen, collaboration tools and…

[The ambitious Virtual Experience Research Accelerator (VERA) project was created to advance human-subjects research on extended reality; in this news release via the University of Central Florida, VERA announces two new milestones toward that goal. See the original version for three more images, and a May 2023 ISPR Presence News post for more context. There’s much more information on the VERA website. –Matthew] UCF-Led VERA Project Reaches 2 Major Milestones for VR Research The Virtual Experience Research Accelerator (VERA), a U.S. National Science Foundation-funded platform designed to advance the pace and scope of immersive research, has launched its first large-scale…

[In what is apparently a world first, a charter school in San Diego, California has purchased two AI-powered humanoid robots to interact with students. It’s “part of a pilot program meant to help [the educators] figure out what role AI – and potentially robots – may play in the future of education.” Of course there are some serious concerns about the effort, including the priorities represented by the high cost of the robots and fears about the possibility of technology being used to replace human teachers. This report from Voice of San Diego describes the early days of the program…

[AI companies and many organizations label and refer to AI agents not as technological tools but as “digital humans,” “employees,” or “coworkers.” As described in this story from MIT Technology Review, researchers from Boston University have found that encouraging what might be considered role-based medium-as-social-actor presence in this way leads to negative outcomes by implying that the AI has skills and responsibilities equivalent to those of humans. As the researchers write, “AI employees appear to occupy a hybrid organizational position: treated as delegated producers rather than tools, but not monitored like human subordinates.” –Matthew] [Image: Credit: Photo Illustration by Sarah…

[This interesting story from UploadVR describes the trajectory of work by creator Marc Zimmermann, who has designed a series of presence-evoking virtual reality experiences that emphasize “mood, movement, sound, and emotional immersion rather than traditional gameplay.” To better understand what these experiences are like, see the original version of the story for six more images and two videos (and of course follow the links and try some of the experiences yourself). –Matthew] How Realms Of Flow Explores A Different Side Of VR By Craig StormJune 4, 2026 Some of the VR experiences that have stayed with me the longest haven’t…

[This story from the University of California, Davis includes lots of interesting comments about the principles behind the design of, and first-person reports about presence and learning from students in, a UC Davis course called “Interactive Shakespeare: From VR to AI.” See the original version for five more pictures and a 2:18 minute video (also on YouTube). For more context, see the July 2022 ISPR Presence News post ”Two forms of ‘Shakespeare Karaoke’ illustrate immersion and isolation issues in EdTech and beyond.” –Matthew] To Be or Not To Be … in Virtual Reality How VR Is Changing the Way Shakespeare…

[In a recent interview the modern philosopher who popularized the Simulation Argument (that we’re all experiencing the ultimate form of presence) commented that prominent people, especially “extreme cases” like Donald Trump and Elon Musk, have more reason to give credence to the possibility that they and we are living inside a simulation. This report from IFLScience does a nice job of summarizing the argument itself and relaying the new comments; it includes links to both the interview with Nick Bostrom and an earlier IFLScience report on whether and how we might or might not want to escape such a simulation.…

[A growing network of hospitals in Kenya are using the Proximie telepresence system to improve obstetric surgical care, as reported in this story from Health Business (the original version includes a second picture). For more information and context, see an April 2021 ISPR Presence News post and the Proximie website (and specifically the August 2022 blog post “The Obstetric Safe Surgery (OSS) Program in Kenya: Co-designing surgical training and mentoring programmes with local teams”). –Matthew] Inside Proximie: How telepresence is transforming surgery and maternal care in Kenya By Pauline Achieng TomJune 3, 2026 In Kibwezi Makueni County, a mother suffers…

[A new tool developed by researchers at the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST) in South Korea provides a way to preserve sensory immersion and presence during a virtual reality experience while allowing the user to interact with objects in their physical environment, a potentially valuable alternative to image passthrough and removing the VR headset. Basic details are in this story from the Chosun Daily (the English edition of the Chosun Ilbo); more information is available in this published article: Elsharkawy, A., Gim, B., Ataya, A., & Kim, S. (2026). SelfBlending: Artificial Intelligence-Driven Augmentation with Hand Interactions for Seamless…