[Note how the author of this story from The Verge about a new, promising effort to popularize virtual reality describes the strong sense of presence he experienced in a recent demo without actually using the term presence. The original version includes another image and a 1:46 minute video.  –Matthew]

Hollywood and AMC theaters are betting on VR with Dreamscape Immersive

Steven Spielberg, Hans Zimmer, and director Gore Verbinski get into the game

by Bryan Bishop
September 26, 2017

The notion that virtual reality is going to be the next great storytelling medium has run into some bumps along the way. There’s still no real sense of what a great VR experience should actually be, and even less of an idea of how it can be turned into a viable business. Today, AMC Entertainment is announcing a partnership that will bring VR to its movie theaters starting in 2018, and its partner may be a key player in shaping what audiences will come to expect from virtual reality in the years to come.… read more. “Spielberg and Dreamscape Immersive to bring multi-person, tactile VR to AMC theaters”

[This press release from The Guardian announces a new virtual experience designed to help increase empathy and understanding of autism; for other similar efforts, see articles in the Times of Malta and Lovin Malta, and the UK’s National Autistic Society. –Matthew]

Guardian launches The Party – A virtual experience of autism

9 October 2017

The Guardian is pleased to announce the launch of The Party – A virtual experience of autism, the publisher’s latest virtual reality (VR) project.

The Party places viewers in the shoes of newly-diagnosed Layla, a 15-year old, autistic girl at her mother’s surprise birthday party. Through the dramatised piece, viewers experience Layla’s attempts to cope with a stressful situation using the coping mechanisms she has devised to manage her anxiety. Viewers also undergo the sensory and auditory overload that can be endured by autistic people in a challenging environment.… read more. “Using VR and presence to help people experience and understand autism”

[It’s encouraging to see the potential impacts of new presence-evoking technologies lead to discussions about ethical guidelines for designing presence experiences. This story about the ethics of presence in the context of journalism is from Undark. –Matthew]

Virtual Reality and Journalistic Ethics: Where Are the Lines?

VR can transport viewers directly into news stories. But questions linger about how the stories are produced, and how audiences remember them.

09.27.2017 / By Dan Robitzski

Imagine if you could spend a morning climbing a skyscraper, running with the bulls in Spain, or even walking on Pluto. As news outlets experiment with immersive content like virtual reality and 360-degree video, a smartphone and simple cardboard headset can make that happen.

According to Graham Roberts, director of Immersive Platforms Storytelling at the New York Times, the goal of journalism produced using these new tools is the same as it has always been: to transport readers into the story.… read more. “VR, presence and journalistic ethics: Where are the lines?”

[A new system developed at MIT will make it possible to communicate more naturally with robots, in many different contexts, via medium-as-social-actor presence. The story is from MIT News, and a 2:25 minute video is available in coverage by Design News and on YouTube. –Matthew]

Robot learns to follow orders like Alexa

ComText, from the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, allows robots to understand contextual commands.

Adam Conner-Simons | Rachel Gordon | CSAIL
August 30, 2017

Despite what you might see in movies, today’s robots are still very limited in what they can do. They can be great for many repetitive tasks, but their inability to understand the nuances of human language makes them mostly useless for more complicated requests.

For example, if you put a specific tool in a toolbox and ask a robot to “pick it up,” it would be completely lost.… read more. “MIT’s ComText lets robots learn to follow contextual commands like Alexa”

[As this story from Forbes notes, we’re living in an era that “used to be science fiction” – the ‘Brainternet’ project raises a variety of interesting and potentially scary prospects for forms of presence enabled by networked brain-computer interfaces. For more details see the press release from University of the Witwatersrand and coverage in Motherboard, both of which include a 2:45 minute video. –Matthew]

Are You Ready To Have Your Brain Connected To The Internet?

September 24, 2017
David DiSalvo, Contributor
(Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own)

By now we’re all familiar with the “Internet of Things” and have accepted that anything that can be digitally linked through the endless expanse of the internet no doubt will be. But what happens when one of those things is your brain? In another example of “this used to be science fiction,” that’s where we’re going next: neural digitization, our brains becoming nodes on the net.… read more. “Toward the Matrix: Are you ready to have your brain connected to the internet?”