[The pandemic has increased the potential value of telepresence robots for tourism, with new robots and revenue models on the way. This story is from Skift, where the original includes two more images and a one minute video. –Matthew] Robots Came For Your Jobs, Now They’re Coming for Your Vacations: Here’s How Sean O’Neill, Skift August 28, 2020 SKIFT TAKE: Are there really enough people who want to remote-control a robot and visit places virtually? We’re skeptical. But the founder of the startup Propelmee is surprisingly persuasive at the potential uses for such robots. — Sean O’Neill The robots were…

[Posts here in April and July highlighted the use of cardboard cutouts to provide a sense of the physical presence of people who can’t attend events because of the pandemic. The trend is continuing and expanding, including in my hometown, as reported in this story from The Philadelphia Inquirer (where the original version includes three more pictures). Any web search will reveal many more examples, but here are four that show the breadth of the phenomenon: How Jesús Luzardo connected with family of victim of Florida school shooting through cardboard cutout (Daily Democrat) Conan O’Brien will turn you into a…

[There were several presence-related announcements at this week’s Facebook Connect conference and this story from The Verge touches on them, but it’s particularly interesting because it focuses on how CEO Mark Zuckerberg views the future, including this: “The thing that excites me about virtual and augmented reality is the feeling of presence. The idea that this is the first computing platform in the history of computing, where you really feel like you’re there with another person. Right? Delivering a sense of presence is the thing that I care about. And VR and AR are going to be the technologies that…

[The project described in this story from Rowan University in New Jersey represents a potentially very valuable application of presence-evoking technology.  –Matthew] Bringing STEM careers to rural students: NSF grant will use virtual reality videos to expose high schoolers to in-demand technical careers August 17, 2020 A $496,963 grant from the National Science Foundation will help Rowan University researchers from two colleges introduce STEM careers to high school students in rural South Jersey. Led by professors Sarah Ferguson and Kara Ieva from the College of Education and Christopher Winkler from the Ric Edelman College of Communication & Creative Arts, the…

[The two stories below, from Auganix and Business Up North, describe different efforts to use presence-evoking technology to recreate aspects of the sailing of the English ship Mayflower from England to the New World in 1620 to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the iconic journey. –Matthew] University of Birmingham team creates Virtual Reality reconstruction of the Mayflower pilgrim vessel for 400th anniversary of sailing September 16, 2020 By Sam Sprigg, Managing Editor Experts from the University of Birmingham have developed a virtual reality (VR) reconstruction of the Mayflower, one of the earliest pilgrim vessels and a cultural icon in the…

[We usually assume that photographs, especially modern high-resolution ones, reveal reality and are therefore most likely to evoke presence, but as Ian Bogost points out in The Atlantic, cameras “’make’ images—they don’t ‘capture’ them”; of course the same can be said of our sensory and perceptual apparatus, adding another layer of differences between what exists and what we see (particularly significant ones for those of us with limited vision). It’s only in extreme cases like the many wildfires in California and other West Coast states that the limitations of photographic technology break our normal experience of presence with technology-generated images.…