ISPR Presence News

Monthly Archives: May 2015

Call: Social Believability in Games Workshop (SBG 2015) at AIIDE 2015

[See also the Call for Papers for AIIDE 2015, with fast approaching deadlines. –Matthew]

1st Call for Papers to the Social Believability in Games Workshop 2015 @ AIIDE

Paper and demo submission: July 3, 2015

The Social Believability in Games Workshop of 2015 (SBG2015) is organised in cooperation with the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE’15).

The workshop will be held on the 15th of November 2015 at the University of California Santa Cruz, California.

The Social Believability in Games Workshop intends to be a point of interaction for researchers and game developers interested in different aspects of modeling, discussing, and developing believable social agents and Non-Player Characters (NPC). This can include discussions around behavior based on social and behavioral science theories and models, social affordances when interacting with game worlds and more. We invite participants from a multitude of disciplines in order to create a broad spectrum of approaches to the area.… read more. “Call: Social Believability in Games Workshop (SBG 2015) at AIIDE 2015”

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Dive into ‘infinity’ with dizzying, interactive 360 panoramas of Vietnam’s Son Doong cave

[Another amazing place most of us will never see in person but that we can now ‘visit’ via presence technology. The National Geographic story includes a 1:15 minute video and the high resolution interactive 360 panoramas. –Matthew]

Son Doong 360 graphic

Dive Into ‘Infinity’ With Dizzying Views of A Colossal Cave

A series of 360° panoramas allows anyone with an internet connection to experience Vietnam’s Son Doong cave, one of the planet’s biggest.

By Jane J. Lee
Interactive and photographs by Martin Edström
Published May 20, 2015

Son Doong is one of the world’s largest caves, with enormous chambers that can comfortably fit a 747 airplane or an entire New York City block full of 40-story buildings. Its mammoth chambers extend so far that explorers have called Son Doong an “infinite cave.” And with an amazing new digital tour, you can plunge below ground to see it yourself without ever leaving the country.… read more. “Dive into ‘infinity’ with dizzying, interactive 360 panoramas of Vietnam’s Son Doong cave”

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Job: Design Researcher – Interaction & Games Lab at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences

Design Researcher (0.6 fte) at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA) for a position within the Media, Creation and Information Knowledge Centre.

Hours: 24.0 hours per week
Salary: maximum € 4365
Education: Doctorate

www.academictransfer.com/28247

Apply for this job within 19 days

JOB DESCRIPTION

The research project is part of the Amsterdam Creative Industries Network programme at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, and more specifically at the Interaction & Games Lab. The Play and Civic Media lectureship, under which this position falls, focuses on research into digital and nondigital play and urban interaction design that optimizes the user experience.

The most important question addressed by this research is how design thinking, strategies, tools and software can be implemented to increase the effectiveness of game, play and other forms of urban interaction and self organisation. This can cover learning goals within educational processes, behavioural change in health care, or attitudinal change with regard to all kinds of societal issues.… read more. “Job: Design Researcher – Interaction & Games Lab at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences”

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The whispery world of ASMR enters virtual reality

[Even without the jump to VR, the ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) phenomenon has links to flow, synesthesia, and presence; this story from Boing Boing includes a 12:13 minute video and the link to the 17:18 minute interactive 360° ASMR video available from Littlestar. If nothing else, read the last sentence of the story below, and for more background, see an earlier piece in Boing Boing and a recent story about the early evidence regarding ASMR in New York Magazine. –Matthew]

The K3YS 360 ASMR Experience graphic

The whispery world of ASMR enters virtual reality

For the first time, ASMR experiences are pioneering beyond simple soft talk.

By Laura Hudson
May 27, 2015

Several years ago, a small number people on internet message boards started bonding around a shared experience: how the sound of whispering, crinkling or tapping produced a relaxing, even euphoric tingling sensation in their bodies.… read more. “The whispery world of ASMR enters virtual reality”

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Call: International Journal of Human-Computer Studies: Special Issue on Animal-Computer Interaction

[Members of the presence community have often commented on the ability of animals to experience spatial and social presence; note especially the second bullet point below…  -Matthew]

Call for Contributions:

International Journal of Human-Computer Studies: Special Issue on Animal-Computer Interaction

SUBMISSION:
Manuscript should be prepared according to the IJHCS Guide for authors. Please select SI: ACI when you reach the “Article Type” step in the submission process at http://ees.elsevier.com/ijhcs/.

TIMELINES:
Submission Deadline: 30 June 2015
Final Paper Due: 31 December 2015

GUEST EDITORS:
Clara Mancini, The Open University, c.mancini@open.ac.uk
Oskar Juhlin, Stockholm University, oskarj@dsv.su.se
Adrian David Cheock, City University London, adriancheok@mixedrealitylab.org
Shaun Lawson, University of Lincoln, slawson@lincoln.ac.uk

Animals have interacted with technology for a long time. Already in the ’60s, bears were wearing tracking devices within conservation research; while mice and pigeons were working with operant chambers in task-driven behavioral experiments.… read more. “Call: International Journal of Human-Computer Studies: Special Issue on Animal-Computer Interaction”

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The future of remote work feels like teleportation

[A vision of the future of presence in the context of work; this is from The Wall Street Journal, where the story includes a 2:22 minute video. –Mathew]

DORA

[Image: Students at The University of Pennsylvania have created DORA, a robot that both mimics the movements of and sends visual information to a virtual reality headset. Their goal is to give users the experience of actually inhabiting the robot’s body, even if it’s halfway around the world. Photo: Drew Evans/The Wall Street Journal]

The Future of Remote Work Feels Like Teleportation

Virtual-reality headsets, 3-D cameras help make videoconferencing immersive

By Christopher Mims
May 10, 2015

I have experienced the future of remote work, and it feels a lot like teleportation. Whether I was in a conference room studded with monitors, on a video-chat system that leverages 3-D cameras, or strapped into a virtual-reality headset inhabiting the body of a robot, I kept having the same feeling over and over again: I was there—where collaboration needed to happen.… read more. “The future of remote work feels like teleportation”

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Call: Virtual Environments and Advanced Interfaces (VEAI’2015)

​Call for Papers

“Virtual Environments and Advanced Interfaces” (VEAI’2015)
http://sites.google.com/a/my.westminster.ac.uk/veai2015/
Workshop within the 14th IEEE International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing and Communications (IUCC-2015)
Liverpool, 26-28 October 2015
http://cse.stfx.ca/~iucc2015/index.html

OVERVIEW

The workshop on “Virtual Environments and Advanced Interfaces” within the 14th IEEE International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing and Communications (IUCC-2015) that will be held on 26-28 October 2015 in Liverpool, UK aims to promote the discussion about ways of enhancing human computer interaction and communication in Immersive Virtual Environments. To address relevant challenges, VR software and hardware need to be adopted in embedded environments to allow intuitive interaction between users and/or agents. It will provide an opportunity for researchers and practitioners to present their latest work on evaluating the impact of advanced interfaces on human interaction and communication and will highlight innovative applications and research outcomes.

We invite original papers (full/short papers, industrial case studies) that discuss the topic in term of concepts, pilots, state of the art, research, standards, implementations, running experiments, applications, and industrial case studies.… read more. “Call: Virtual Environments and Advanced Interfaces (VEAI’2015)”

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Retinad to bring pre-roll ads and analytics to VR

[If there have to be ads in VR, this may be a promising way to do it, and as the author of this piece in Road to VR notes, the analytics may be useful to (presence) designers. –Matthew]

Retinad pre-roll VR ad

[Image: Here a pre-roll screenshot of another VR game is shown before another VR experience. Floating gaze-based menu options allow users to skip or interact with the ad.]

Retinad’s Promising VR Ad and Analytics System is Now Backed with a $500,000 Investment

By Ben Lang – May 20, 2015

Retinad, a company working to bring immersive advertising and analytics to virtual reality, has just closed a $500,000 early-stage round to bring their solution to market. Avoiding the worst case banner-in-your-face approach, the company is jumping feet first into VR, bringing immersive (but not invasive) pre-roll ads and useful analytics tools that could be a hit with developers and advertisers alike.… read more. “Retinad to bring pre-roll ads and analytics to VR”

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Call: “Image Embodiment: New Perspectives of the Sensory Turn” for Yearbook of Moving Image Studies

Call for Papers

Yearbook of Moving Image Studies:
Image Embodiment: New Perspectives of the Sensory Turn

Deadline for Abstracts: August 1, 2015
Deadline for Articles: January 11, 2016

The double-blind peer-reviewed Yearbook of Moving Image Studies (YoMIS) is now accepting articles from scientists, scholars, artists and film makers for the second issue entitled “Image Embodiment: New Perspectives of the Sensory Turn.” YoMIS will be enriched by disciplines like media and film studies, image science, (film) philosophy, art history, game studies and other research areas related to the moving image in general.

Theories addressing the embodiment of the human mind discuss the relationship between subject and environment. Especially the international discourse in philosophy and cognitive psychology reflects the topics of embodied cognition (see Lakoff & Johnson 1980; Clark 1997; Gallagher 2005), extended or embedded mind (Haugeland 1995; Clark & Chalmers 1998), multimodality of perception (vgl.… read more. “Call: “Image Embodiment: New Perspectives of the Sensory Turn” for Yearbook of Moving Image Studies”

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Study: 3D movies good for brain, more like ‘watching real-life’

[The key phrase in this report from BT (which features more pictures and two videos) is that the study’s results “[add] to the argument that 3D movies are more like watching real-life”; more details are in coverage by Forbes. –Matthew]

3D film study

How watching 3D movies could be good for your brain

A scientific experiment has shown 3D movies to have a positive impact on brain activity.

Last updated: 22 May 2015

If you’ve been to a 3D movie in the last couple of years, you can probably appreciate that it creates a more immersive experience.

However, a group of scientists and neuroscientists believe it can do more than just that – they say it heightens brain activity in such a way that it could actually be used to slow decline in cognitive function.

The experiment was carried out by a partnership between neuroscientist Patrick Fagan, and science group Thrill Laboratory.… read more. “Study: 3D movies good for brain, more like ‘watching real-life’”

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