[Our colleagues Skip Rizzo and Jim Blascovich are quoted in this interesting story from Pacific Standard about the potential of VR to simulate the experiences generated by psychedelic drugs; in the process there are some insights about how it’s possible to “be there” but know that you’re not there during a presence experience. For more information and a video about the Ayahuasca (Kosmik Journey) VR experience, see the a-BAHN website and for a first-person report on the experience see The Cut. –Matthew] [Image: A man tries out a virtual reality game inside a Fulldome.pro 360-degree projection dome on opening day…

[This opinion column from The Next Web highlights some of the many ethical, factual and financial problems with a new presence service offered by a pornography company. Despite these issues, it’s interesting to note the evolution of technologies used to record our sexual and other activities for re-experiencing later move beyond still photography and audio to film and video to virtual reality. For more information including images and videos find the company’s website. –Matthew] [Image: Source: VR Bangers] Porn company wants $10K to shoot you screwing in VR before you’re too old to be attractive By Tristan Greene July 25,…

[TechCrunch reports on a different type of out-of-home VR-based presence experience in New York; see the original version for three different pictures, and for more details and another first-person report on the experience see coverage in Bloomberg. –Matthew] [Image: Source: Bloomberg] The Museum of Future Experiences offers a spooky, surreal take on VR It’s definitely not a normal VR arcade July 30, 2019 Anthony Ha Here’s what I knew when I visited the Museum of Future Experiences: The startup is part of the current batch of companies at Y Combinator, and it’s doing work with virtual reality.…

[In a parallel to the movement from Computers Are Social Actors (CASA) to Media As Social Actor (MASA) presence, this story from The Conversation describes a new “Multimodal Turing Test” that evaluates not only whether a computer seems to have the intelligence of a human but whether a humanoid robot is “indistinguishable from a real human.” See the original version for three more pictures. –Matthew] [Image: Hanson Robotics’ android “Sophia.” Credit: Anton Gvozdikov/Shutterstock] Our Turing Test for androids will judge how lifelike humanoid robots can be July 30, 2019 Carl Strathearn, PhD Candidate, Staffordshire University Alan Turing was recently announced…