[This short story from PsyPost is about a logical and potentially valuable application of presence for accurately diagnosing social anxiety.

Note: ISPR Presence News will be away on Thursday and Friday and return on Monday.

–Matthew]

[Image: Credit: Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung]

Virtual reality technology could be a powerful tool in diagnosing social anxiety disorder

Eric W. Dolan
September 23, 2017

A team of German researchers is hoping to use virtual reality technology to diagnose social anxiety disorder. Their initial results have been published in the scientific journal Computers in Human Behavior.

“Most of the work done with VR so far (including from our workgroup) was done either as a treatment for anxiety disorders or as a method to investigate mechanisms behind exposure therapy. This is one of the first studies that used VR as a possible diagnostic tool (in this case for social fear),” explained study author Youssef Shiban of the University of Regensburg.

“Once validated in other studies, this could open new doors for us as therapists and researchers, as we can use behavioral and psychophysiological data to better diagnose. This is extremely useful as most diagnoses are conducted per conversation and are based on subjective input from the patient that could be biased for various reasons.” Read more on VR and presence could be powerful tool in diagnosing social anxiety disorder…

[As with other presence-evoking technologies, advertising in VR and AR can easily cause breaks in presence; this story from Venture Beat describes how one company is working to minimize the likelihood of this frustrating and counter-productive phenomenon (the CEO uses the phrase “breaking immersion”). –Matthew]

Advrty brings native ads to virtual reality

Stephanie Chan
September 21, 2017

Advrty wants to offer a new avenue of monetization for virtual reality developers, which doesn’t involve full field-of-view pop-up ads. Instead, it’s a platform aimed toward designing and incorporating nonintrusive product placement. It’s in beta.

“Initially, think billboards, posters and product placements using images or video,” said CEO and cofounder Niklas Bakos in an email. “It could be a label on a cup. To get ad relevancy, we’ve created a patent-pending context-based system that will allow for proper targeting in a case where we wouldn’t allow a billboard creative to end up on a soda can label, or an ad for the iPhone X to [show] in a game that is all about the medieval era, for example.”

And this is the most important thing, Bakos says: not breaking immersion. The Advrty platform intends to bring users to the ads instead of the other way around. Bakos says that their technology will be able to track where users are looking and what they’re interacting with. This means that it can place ads in “high-traffic” areas in the environment. Read more on Advrty brings native ads to VR to minimize breaks in presence…

[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”…