[This discussion from The New Yorker is full of incomplete but provocative ideas about the nature of our experience of both reality and mediated/virtual reality. –Matthew] [Image: Credit Sarah Lee / eyevine / Redux] Werner Herzog Talks Virtual Reality By Patrick House January 12, 2016 “I’m a skeptic of 3-D, but when I saw the paintings I knew I had to use it,” Werner Herzog told Judith Thurman in 2010, after the New York première of his documentary “Cave of Forgotten Dreams.” The film examines some of the world’s earliest known paintings, which cover the walls of the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave,…

[Even inexpensive VR gear is becoming more realistic and likely to evoke presence; this is from Motherboard. –Matthew] [Image: Screenshot from Google’s sample app for audio spatialization.] 3D Sound Is Coming to Google Cardboard to Make Virtual Worlds More Real Michael Byrne, Editor January 14, 2016 Google’s goofy but cool Cardboard virtual-reality platform is getting an audio upgrade. On Wednesday, Cardboard project manager Nathan Martz announced via the Google Developer’s Blog that software development kits (SDKs) for both the Java-based (Android) and Unity-based (iOS) implementations of the VR headset API would be getting support for audio spatialization. Now, Cardboard apps…

[This Panasonic prototype seems to evoke presence in multiple ways (the headline in The Verge is “Panasonic’s transparent display is hard for your eyes to believe”); the story below is from Digital Journal, where it features a different image and the 2:05 minute video from YouTube. For a nice summary of this and a wide variety of other presence-related tech at CES 2016 see coverage in CNN Money. ––Matthew] [Image: Source: CNN Money] Panasonic’s transparent TV disappears when you wave at it By James Walker Jan 12, 2016 As part of its demonstrations during CES 2016 last week, Panasonic unveiled…

[Without using the term, this story from Engadget covers key current challenges and future prospects for designing effective presence illusions; for more details see coverage in The Verge. –Matthew] [Image: Source: The Verge] Fox pushes virtual reality to the limit with 30 minutes on Mars Being Matt Damon has never been easier. Joseph Volpe January 08, 2016 I wasn’t prepared for The Martian VR Experience. All I’d known before sitting down in a padded seat in a near-pitch-black booth, tucked away in the Library bar at Vegas’ Marquee nightclub, was that I’d be enveloped in virtual reality for up to…

[We usually study individual, brief presence experiences, but the ‘performance’ in this story looks ahead to when VR and presence is a way of life. It’s from The Creators Project, where you’ll find four more images and two videos. –Matthew] This Guy Just Spent 48 Hours in Virtual Reality By DJ Pangburn — Jan 14 2016 After decades of broken dreams, virtual reality appears to be fulfilling its promise. It’s not just that the hardware and software are finally arriving with Oculus Rift and Samsung Gear headsets (motion sickness not excluded); it’s that artists, game designers, filmmakers, and other creatives…

[No need to imagine what the game player will see – these clever people “injected an actor into a scene using VR” and then captured their performance; the story is from Ars Technica, where it includes the 3:50 minute explanatory video. See the studio’s blog for more information and images. –Matthew] Is this the world’s first full virtual-reality motion/voice capture session? Actors combine mo-cap suit, HTC Vive to become characters, see virtual teleprompters. by Sam Machkovech – Jan 13, 2016 Forget latex suits and white ping-pong balls. Motion-capture sessions for video games and films have only gotten more intense over…