[Adding more personality to voice assistants could increase medium-as-social-actor presence for users. This story from Digiday, which includes a 1:20 minute video, describes an interesting example created by the B-Reel agency. The experience might be optimized if users could adjust the degree, and even type, of personality expressed. –Matthew]

This agency created a voice assistant inspired by a Swedish grandmother

September 25, 2017 by Ilyse Liffreing

Google Home, Echo and other voice-activated devices have many capabilities, but one agency believes they lack something essential for the future of voice: personality.

B-Reel designed a virtual assistant that takes on the persona of a Swedish grandmother. Named Sammi, the round, yellow and blue device hangs on a wall at the agency’s Los Angeles office, ready to dole out grandmotherly advice in her robotic Swedish accent, a homage to the agency’s Swedish roots. The robot, made from IBM Watson technology and designed to look like a grandfather clock, operates differently than voice assistants on the market today, which show snippets of personality at most in the jokes they tell.

With Google Home or Alexa, one can count on them to do what they are told, as long as they hear you correctly. With Sammi, that’s not always the case.

“She definitely expresses her mood, which can change from time to time like an actual grandmother,” said Petter Westlund, chief creative officer at B-Reel and creator of Sammi. “Sometimes she’s accommodating, and other times she’s grumpy and will do what she wants.” For instance, ask her to play Kanye West, and Sammi will either do so (after you say the “magic word”), or she might play the music she likes — Swedish folk music. Or, ask her to order a burrito, and she might order a salad instead because she thinks it’s healthier. Read more on Sammi, a voice assistant with a Swedish grandmother’s personality…

[This story from Smithsonian Magazine is an effective reminder that VR is just the latest popular attempt to use technology to create presence experiences (example quote: “The world in a stereoscope seemed transcendent, hyper-real”). I agree with the concluding suggestion that VR will eventually become just another tool and perhaps fade from use, but I’m confident we’ll continue to be driven to develop (and popularize) technologies that are increasingly effective at evoking presence. The original story contains many more images and a link to a related book. –Matthew]

[Image: This Underwood & Underwood stereograph (c. 1901) shows a woman viewing stereographs in her home. Credit: Library of Congress]

Stereographs Were the Original Virtual Reality

The shocking power of immersing oneself in another world was all the buzz once before—about 150 years ago

By Clive Thompson
Smithsonian Magazine | Subscribe
October 2017

If you walked into Charles Herzog’s classroom last spring, you’d have seen a peculiarly modern sight: middle schoolers all staring into virtual-reality gear. Their bodies, officially, were at Flood Brook School in Vermont, perched atop stools and set among a set of comfy couches, whiteboards and cubbies. But mentally, they were teleporting around the world.

The kids were viewing VR footage of refugee children who’d fled war in South Sudan, Syria and Ukraine. It was called “The Displaced,” and came courtesy of a free VR app launched by the New York Times Magazine, which you view by placing a phone in a Google Cardboard viewer. As Herzog’s students craned their necks around, they saw the swampy terrain of South Sudan and the dilapidated buildings where the Ukrainian children played. (Full disclosure: I sometimes write for the New York Times Magazine too.)

Later, when they put their headsets down, the students told Herzog they were stunned by the intensity of the experience—and how much more emotionally they intuited the brutal dislocations wrought by war. They’d read about this stuff and seen videos about it. But the VR hammered it into their souls.

“It’s really deep immersion,” Herzog told me later. “They feel like they’re in whatever world they’ve been placed into.”

VR, it seems, is finally edging into the mainstream. As head-mounted devices—such as the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive—have dropped below $1,000 (or as low as $5 for Google Cardboard), more people than ever are peering into this new realm. Doctors use it to show the ventricles of the heart; artists create hallucinogenic visualizations; game designers build immersive shoot-’em-ups and kookily creative tools like Tilt Brush, which lets you draw virtual sculptures in the air. Documentary filmmakers are flocking to shoot VR “experiences,” using newfangled 360-degree cameras.

The high-tech age has given birth to many addictive new media, including websites, YouTube videos and endless text chat. But proponents say VR is different. By hijacking our entire field of vision, it has more persuasive power than TV, radio or any other previous medium. VR, as the filmmaker Chris Milk proclaims, is “an empathy machine.”

Why does VR get its hooks into our psyche? What’s so intense about 3-D? That’s a question people pondered back in the mid-19th century, when they peered into an exotic new tool for summoning virtual worlds: the stereoscope. Read more on The power of presence: Stereographs as the original virtual reality…

[I’m just back from the IBC2017 Conference, where I gave a talk, got a glimpse of new technologies and had a series of valuable and enjoyable conversations about presence; great thanks to long-time presence advocate and producer of the IBC technical sessions Nick Lodge (info; video).

The story below from Fast Company describes a VR project that raises a series of intriguing questions about presence without ever using the term; if only Horton and Wohl, who originated the term parasocial interaction, could see “Fall in Love VR.” The original version of the story includes a second image and a 0:29 minute video; follow the link to the project’s website for more information and a 1:21 minute video. –Matthew]

How Virtual Reality Could Help You Fall In Love

“Fall in Love VR,” for the Oculus Rift, shows how integrating natural-language processing in virtual reality can create a sense of real intimacy.

By Daniel Terdiman
September 19, 2017

In 2015, The New York Times caused quite a stir by publishing “The 36 Questions That Lead To Love,” based on work by the psychologist Arthur Aron. The main idea was that people would have to be incredibly vulnerable to ask and answer such questions—and doing so could quickly build intimacy.

“The most interesting thing from the research,” said Kevin Cornish, the director of Fall in Love VR, “is this premise that the thing that creates human bonds is not the words we say to each other, but the act of conversation.”

In Cornish’s new virtual reality project, released today for the Oculus Rift, users confront the question of whether it’s possible to experience intimacy with an avatar by sitting across from one of five photo-realistic actors and, one by one, asking many of Aron’s questions off prompt cards. Out loud.

The speaking-out-loud bit is key, as the potential love interests, looking adorable, yet vulnerable, respond only when the specific questions are asked. Ask or say anything else and they just sit there looking expectant.

That’s because Fall in Love VR, from Tool of North America, uses natural language processing –becoming among the first to utilize the technology in an interactive VR project–to make users feel like they’re truly having an intimate conversation. Cornish said he got the idea when working on a VR film with Taylor Swift. “There was one moment where [Swift] looks into the camera,” he recalls, “and it feels like she’s looking at you and talking to you. There’s a connection that you can get in VR and not any other medium.” Read more on “Fall in Love VR” creates “a sense of real intimacy”…

[This story from Digital Trends is a realistic, and in the end hopeful, look at what it’ll take to turn browsing the web into a presence-evoking experience; the original version includes a second image and two videos. –Matthew]

VR Web Browsing Needs Revolution More Than Evolution

By Jon Martindale
September 9, 2017

Virtual reality has given us new ways to play games, and has the potential to bring us closer to loved ones around the world, but it’s yet nail down how to let us browse the internet properly. We’re still far from having a VR headset replace an entire desktop work machine, or be a better conduit to online video than your smartphone.

Books and movies from the early days of computing romanced us with the possibilities. Neuromancer, Johnny Mnemonic, and many of their techy-contemporaries imagined a future where the internet was something we moved through with physical motion and gestures. While some aspects of their predictions seem silly now, an argument could be made that they’re a better interpretation of what VR web browsing could be than the rehashed 2D internet we can view in VR today.

There are many companies looking to move us towards an overhauled VR internet future, but as it stands now, the experience is barebones and far from what it needs to be. As VR web browsing becomes more comfortable, it seems more apparent than ever that we need an entirely new way of accessing information online. Read more on VR web browsing needs revolution more than evolution…

[Quantifying the health benefits of different activities in virtual environments could be valuable in promoting presence; the original version of this story from the San Francisco Chronicle includes two more images. –Matthew]

[Image: Aaron Stanton exercises using a virtual reality headset at San Francisco State University on Monday, Aug. 21, 2017. Photo: James Tensuan, Special to the Chronicle.]

S.F. State tests benefits of workouts in virtual reality games

By Nanette Asimov
September 5, 2017

You enter the boxing ring and face your opponent. He glares at you, his bulging pecs glistening under the arena lights. Pow! You nail him with a right hook to the jaw. He cross punches. You duck. You jab. He reels.

Sweat drips down your face. Your heart races as the crowd roars — only there is no crowd, and you’ve never actually left home or suffered a blow. You’re standing in your living room, maybe your garage, playing a virtual-reality video game.

And getting a great workout.

How great? That’s the question motivating researchers in San Francisco State University’s kinesiology lab who have paired up with a virtual reality entrepreneur to measure — for the first time — the aerobic benefits of specific games more often associated with the slothful obsessions of youth. Read more on San Francisco State tests benefits of workouts in virtual reality games…