[This Debugger story explains the promise of and our progress toward effective and commonly available holograms (actually volumetric images); our colleague Frank Biocca is one of the experts quoted and the original story includes three videos and an additional image. For related news see USA Today’s story about IKIN’s new RYZ, “the first personal hologram platform”; Digital Trends’ story about Looking Glass Factory’s 3D holographic display and software that transforms any 2D image into a 3D one; and a short Bloomberg video about the Swiss company Inverse’s 3D hologram meeting technology that just won a CES 2021 Best of Innovation…

[Digital Trends reports on the development of a novel exosuit designed to make virtual experiences “indistinguishable from real life”; the original story includes a one minute video and three different images. Coverage in New Atlas adds these details: Reese has been testing it at a simulated 1/20th of normal Earth gravity, making walking around and jumping less laborious than in real life while still giving a user a sense of force and balance. Currently, there are motors only at the hip and knee joints, but future plans would extend this to five motors on each leg, with more on your…

[A January 4, 2021 item in The Ghost Howls blog highlights an interesting and potentially valuable resource, an interactive compilation and classification of over 100 different methods of locomotion in virtual environments. –Matthew]   Discover all the available VR locomotion methods Some amazing researchers have collected and classified all the known VR locomotion methods, for a total of more than 100! There are all the most common solutions, like smooth movement and teleporting, but also some crazy ones like changing the gravity of the world using your fingers. All the data is available for free to everyone on GitHub, so…

[The terminology for presence is different, but this story from Hackaday provides a valuable review and assessment of our progress toward compelling presence experiences. See the original version for an additional image. –Matthew] All the Good VR Ideas Were Dreamt Up in the 60s By Donald Papp January 4, 2021 Virtual reality has seen enormous progress in the past few years. Given its recent surges in development, it may come as a bit of a surprise to learn that the ideas underpinning what we now call VR were laid way back in the 60s. Not all of the imagined possibilities…

[This short story from Forbes describes Microsoft’s efforts to create audio and audio-visual chatbots based on specific people, including people who have died. Other coverage notes the idea’s similarity to the plot of the Black Mirror episode “Be Right Back” and/or refers to the bots as ‘ghostbots.’ For more on this topic see a new 22:46 minute WSJ documentary “How Tech Can Bring Our Loved Ones to Life After They Die,” which is also available via YouTube and is described in a short profile in The Verge. –Matthew] Microsoft Could Bring You Back From The Dead… As A Chat Bot…

[The ambitious project Odeuropa will use AI to analyze descriptions of smells from Europe’s past and then recreate them for use in immersive cultural heritage attractions. This story from Blooloop provides details. The original story includes a second image and for a press release and 2:59 minute video visit the Odeuropa website (which also features a series of interesting blog posts). Coverage in the Minnesota Star Tribune has more details about the challenges of measuring and reproducing smells, and a New York Times item focuses on the idea of a personal smell museum and links to an interactive example: “The…

[In this short piece from Wired, the CEO and co-founder of online gaming platform Roblox predicts the pandemic-accelerated increase in 2021 and beyond of social and spatial presence experiences in 3D virtual worlds, which will “become a human co-experience utility.” –Matthew] [Image: Credit: Leonie Bos] The Metaverse is coming A 3D virtual world where millions meet online will become our key social hub By David Baszucki, an inventor and the CEO and Founder of Roblox January 2, 2021 We will see a shift in the way people play, work, learn or simply hang out in 2021. Some of this connection…