[From The Financial Brand, where the story includes many images and infographics] Lights, Camera… Transactions & Interactions? There is no substitute to talking to consumers when and where they need person-to-person help with their finances. Two-way video banking lets financial institutions keep customer engagements personal and expand the reach while cutting back on their expensive branch investments. August 19, 2013 Telepresence holds great promise for retail banking, but most early-movers are missing the boat. Rather than reinventing the teller experience, banks should pursue video banking as an omnichannel mechanism to improve customer engagement, according to the new report, “Video Banking:…

[From PRWeb] Emory’s Gaming Platform Recovers Urban History—a Virtual Experience of Rome at the Carlos Museum This is the first time a gaming platform has been used at Emory University to recover urban history through an immersive and interactive reconstruction. Atlanta, GA (PRWEB) July 24, 2013 The celebrated bird’s-eye view map of Giovanni Battista Falda, published in 1676, will be transformed into a virtual, walkable, experience of Rome using the gaming platform NVis360, as part of the Carlos Museum’s special exhibition, “Antichità, Teatro, Magnificenza: Renaissance and Baroque Images of Rome,” on view from August 24 through November 17, 2013.…

[From the New York Times] [Image: The video game Disney Infinity shows how characters from the various Disney franchises might be mixed and matched.] Critic’s Notebook The Virtual World Welcomes Toy Players By Chris Suellentrop Published: August 15, 2013 Many people still think of video games as the province of children, precisely because, at the moment of their mass-market origins in the 1970s, they were genuinely kids’ stuff. A December 1980 article in The New York Times Magazine reported that electronics was transforming the toy industry the same way that plastics had 30 years earlier. The article barely differentiated the…

[From Hypergrid Business; a CNET story about Space Glasses is here and the product web site is here] Commentary and Opinion: Maria’s Worlds Virtual reality and the single office worker By Maria Korolov At some distant point in the future, virtual reality will be good enough and immersive enough that we can telecommute to our jobs by simply stepping into some version of a Holodeck or plugging into some version of the Matrix. Today’s virtual reality has only very limited use for the average corporate employee. There are some uses. Rapid prototyping, virtual simulations, the occasional virtual meeting or conference.…

[From Road to VR, where the story includes more pictures; in addition to the links at the end, there’s our recent article “Telepresence and Sexuality”] More Erotic Oculus Rift Games in the Works (Roundup) [NSFW] August 15, 2013 | Posted by Ben Lang The last few days have seen the release of several new erotic experiences for the Oculus Rift. Some are on the art side of the spectrum while others are just flat-out NSFW Oculus Rift pornography. Here’s a round-up of the latest. While we do our best to report on this news without putting any NSFW content directly…

[From Dundalk Chamber] European first as Louth County Museum installs a ‘virtual presenter’ Friday, 26 July 2013  – Dundalk Chamber Up-to-the-minute technology and history are combining with the installation of a Casio Virtual Presenter in the County Museum, Dundalk. The joint project by the Museum, Casio and Quick Response Ireland is the first of its kind in the country and the first such installation at a European museum. Internationally, only one other such Virtual Presenter has gone into use, in Japan. The Virtual Presenter is a cutting-edge tool of Casio Signage, with the power to captivate passers-by with a realistic-looking…