ISPR Presence News

Monthly Archives: November 2018

Call: Participation in online workgroup to develop evaluation instrument for social agents

Call for participation in an online workgroup to develop an evaluation instrument for social agents

Our vision is to create a validated standardised questionnaire instrument to evaluate human interaction with a social agent. This instrument will help researchers to make claims about people’s perceptions, attitude and beliefs towards their agent. It will allow agents to be compared across user studies, and importantly, it helps in replicating our scientific findings. This is essential for the community if we want to make valid claims about the impact that our social agents can have in domains such as health, entertainment, and education.

We have set up an online project at Open Science Framework (OSF), and we are now looking for more researchers interested in participating in the developing this instrument. We are explicitly looking for researchers with a background in conducting user studies with social agents such as intelligent virtual agents, social robots, and conversational agents.… read more. “Call: Participation in online workgroup to develop evaluation instrument for social agents”

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Christmas presence: Immersive “A Christmas Carol” weds VR with motion-capture live actor

[The new production Chained is an intriguing model for personalized, vivid, narrative-based presence experiences. This story about it is from CNET – see the original version for several other pictures and a 3:23 minute video. –Matthew]

This VR-live actor mashup is like your best absinthe-fueled nightmare

Chained, an immersive reimagining of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, weds virtual reality with a motion-capture live actor. Could it be the gateway that makes VR a hit?

By Joan E. Solsman
November 29, 2018

As a chain-laden ghost, I lumber through slices of moonlight in a dark, fire-lit room. I morph into a demonic specter, arching and slumping my massive frame around a pauper’s kitchen, before I re-materialize as a faceless floating apparition, taking you by the hand through a snow-covered graveyard.

At least, that’s what I would look like to you. In your Oculus Rift headset, I become the main character in Chained, a 20-minute immersive VR reimagining of A Christmas Carol and one of the hottest tickets in Los Angeles right now.… read more. “Christmas presence: Immersive “A Christmas Carol” weds VR with motion-capture live actor”

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Call: Informed Experiences, Designing Consent Workshop

Call for Abstracts:
Informed Experiences, Designing Consent
Workshop, April 6, 2019
Chicago
https://www.hastac.org/opportunities/cfp-informed-experiences-designing-consent

Submission deadline: January 23, 2019

Informed Experiences, Designing Consent is a symposium interrogating the intersections of consent and the design of interactive media and technologies. The symposium is hosted at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago by the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions and the HASTAC Scholars fellowship program on April 6, 2019. It is organized by Michael Anthony DeAnda, Elisabeth Hildt, Kelly Laas, and Leilasadat Mirghaderi.

Informed Experiences, Designing Consent is a one-day event intended to bring together researchers, scholars, practitioners, and designers to consider the implications of theoretical, social, and material aspects of consent and design. Some examples of topics include: consent to participate in social media, user agreement, consent in gaming, informed consent to data collection and use, consent in digital humanities research.… read more. “Call: Informed Experiences, Designing Consent Workshop”

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What it’s like to eat at Tokyo’s Tree by Naked virtual reality restaurant

[High-end restaurants are utilizing presence-evoking technologies to enhance the dining experience in interesting ways – here’s a first-person report from Food & Wine; see the original story for more pictures. –Matthew]

I Ate at a Virtual Reality Restaurant and … It’s the Future?

Tokyo’s Tree by Naked is one of the most unique dining experience in the world.

Maria Yagoda
November 28, 2018

Aside from using and abusing the failed portable gaming console Virtual Boy in 1995, I’ve never been excited by virtual reality and its many promises. My reality is vivid, and grotesque, enough—why would I seek out extra reality?

But when I visited Tokyo in October, a city known for its exceptional, wildly diverse dining (and the most Michelin stars of any city in the world), I put one restaurant on the top of my to-eat list that I suspected would pull me out of my comfort zone: Tree by Naked yoyogi park, the new virtual reality dining concept from artist Ryotaro Muramatsu.… read more. “What it’s like to eat at Tokyo’s Tree by Naked virtual reality restaurant”

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Job: Assistant or Associate Professor in Human-Centered Emerging Technologies at Michigan State U

Tenure System Assistant or Associate Professor in Human-Centered Emerging Technologies
Department of Media and Information
Michigan State University
https://comartsci.msu.edu/media-information-job-openings

Review of applications will begin on January 1, 2019

The Department of Media and Information (M&I) at Michigan State University (MSU) seeks an innovative, dynamic individual to fill a full-time, tenure stream position at the assistant or associate professor level who can connect the creative and research approaches in the department, college, and university. We are particularly interested in someone who uses human-centered approaches to design, and is interested in emerging technologies, such as virtual reality, augmented reality, games, gamification, autonomous vehicles, Internet of things, smart homes, health technologies, neuro/biosensors, wearable devices, tangible computing, and other new technologies that are reshaping the world around us. We also value interests in socially relevant topics and making positive change in the world. Our ideal candidate both builds new things in the world and seeks to understand the impacts of the things they build, integrating the “arts” and “sciences” in their work.… read more. “Job: Assistant or Associate Professor in Human-Centered Emerging Technologies at Michigan State U”

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Spatial audio design is key to creating ‘presence’ in VR and AR

[Too few stories about presence acknowledge and discuss the importance and dynamics of audio in presence experiences, and too few use the specific term presence; this story from VentureBeat does both. See the original version for two more images, including one of the “Cone of Experience.” –Matthew]

Spatial audio design is key to creating ‘presence’ in VR and AR

Amir Bozorgzadeh
November 18, 2018

George Lucas once received a hearty round of applause back in 2011 when he declared that “sound is half of the experience of a motion picture.” If that’s true, what happens to the equation in the setting of VR and AR, where the vicarious experience of a 2D cinematic transcends into experiential 3D immersion?

After all, immersive worlds are creative imitations of the real world, in which sound and the auditory function play far more of an operative role than we tend to realize.… read more. “Spatial audio design is key to creating ‘presence’ in VR and AR”

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Call: Storytelling and the Body: An Inclusive Interdisciplinary Conference

Call for Papers

Storytelling and the Body: An Inclusive Interdisciplinary Conference
15th to 16th July 2019
Verona, Italy
http://www.progressiveconnexions.net/interdisciplinary- projects/storytelling/storytelling-and-the-body/conferences/

Submission deadline: 22nd February 2019

We live in an era where stories about bodies – in/visible bodies, glamorous bodies, engineered bodies, trafficked bodies, dismembered bodies, persecuted bodies – are omnipresent. While bodies are literally made of flesh and blood, our understanding of bodies is constructed through fictional and non-fictional stories that shape perceptions of what constitutes the body, how a body should look, how a body should behave, how a body should experience the world and how bodies should interact with each other. By creating these types of norms, stories also shape perceptions of what constitutes deviant, non-normative and otherwise undesirable bodies. Telling stories about the body is therefore an act loaded with ideological, political, sociological, theological, ontological and aesthetic implications.… read more. “Call: Storytelling and the Body: An Inclusive Interdisciplinary Conference”

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Origibot2 telepresence robot is armed for interactivity

[This is a short description of a telepresence robot that has an arm so that the user can not only move through but manipulate a remote environment. The story is from New Atlas, where it includes two more pictures and a 2:58 minute video (also available via YouTube). For much more information see the product’s Indiegogo page. –Matthew]

Origibot2 telepresence robot is armed for interactivity

Ben Coxworth
November 26, 2018

Although telepresence robots do allow remotely-located users to move about an environment, and to see and hear what’s going on there, they don’t actually let those users perform physical tasks. The Origibot2 does do so, however, as it’s equipped with an arm and gripper.

Made by Miami-based Origin Robotics, the open-source Arduino-microcomputer-packin’ robot is – not surprisingly – a successor to the company’s previously-released Origibot. Like that model, it’s equipped with an included Android tablet, and can be remotely-controlled via an iOS/Android/Windows/Mac web app from anywhere in the world with internet access.… read more. “Origibot2 telepresence robot is armed for interactivity”

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Call: Impact of Immersive Environments – Journal of Virtual Worlds Research

Call for Papers

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research
Issue on Impact of Immersive Environments
https://www.jvwresearch.org/index.php/component/content/article/10-cfps/94-cfp-impact

To be edited by:
Michael Thomas, University of Central Lancashire, UK (Prime)
Tuncer Can, University of Istanbul, Turkey
Michael Vallance, Future University, Japan

Abstracts deadline: December 20, 2018

MOTIVATION AND SCOPE

Over the last two decades research on virtual worlds and immersive environments has engaged with a wide variety of stakeholders and beneficiaries across many disciplines and fields that naturally involve high stakes, engaging with participants with learning and physical disabilities to the military, citizen democracy and digital civics.

In this issue we want to tackle the following issues:

  • What is the usefulness of such research?
  • Who are the main beneficiaries of the research?
  • What real-world problems does the research on virtual worlds address?
  • How can the effectiveness of the research be measured, if at all?
read more. “Call: Impact of Immersive Environments – Journal of Virtual Worlds Research”
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“Virtual Archaeology” lets University of Illinois students explore mammoth cave on campus

[The story below from the University of Illinois Behind the Scenes blog describes another example of how presence experiences can help people “learn by doing.” The original version includes eight pictures and a 0:59 minute video; see coverage in The News-Gazette for more details. –Matthew]

[Image: Third-year doctoral student Cameron Merrill ‘digs’ as anthropology Professor Laura Shackelford watches a monitor Friday Nov. 16, 2018, at Virtual Archaeology, a virtual-reality lab in Davenport Hall on the University of Illinois campus in Urbana. Photo by: Rick Danzl/The News-Gazette.]

Excavating a cave without leaving campus

By Diana Yates, Life Sciences Editor, U. Of I. News Bureau
November 14, 2018

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – I’m in a cave with three identical waterfalls. The roar of water fills my ears as I look around, a little shakily. This is not what I was expecting when I showed up to Davenport Hall for an interview.… read more. ““Virtual Archaeology” lets University of Illinois students explore mammoth cave on campus”

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