[In this Wired story Lucy Sparrow, a PhD student in Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne, Australia, suggests ways to use policies, practices and design techniques from gaming and the real (nonmediated) world to help make social interactions and experiences in virtual reality and other virtual environments more safe and accessible for everyone. –Matthew] [Image: Credit: Photo-Illustration by Sam Whitney; Getty Images] How to Govern the Metaverse To build healthy communities in virtual reality, we must move beyond automated penalties toward proactive forms of governance. Games can show us how. By Lucy Sparrow October 19.2021 IT WAS…

[This short piece from Axios suggests that the pandemic motivated many media companies to offer new technology features designed to add a social component (and implicitly social presence) to what previously had been isolated media experiences, and that these changes are becoming permanent. –Matthew] [Image: Credit: Sarah Grillo/Axios] The living room is now a virtual hub By Sara Fischer, author of Media Trends October 18, 2021 Internet companies are leaning into new services that add a social component to the otherwise isolated experience of staying home in front of a screen. Why it matters: These options for virtual watch parties,…

[Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, or EPFL, reports on a new way for experts and the public to experience the known universe; see the original story (or a long read version) for videos and many more images. Coverage by the AP via the Chicago Sun-Times adds these details: “Imagine it as a sort of Google Earth — only for the entire universe. […] Strap on the VR goggles, and it’s a trippy feeling seeing the Moon — seemingly the size of a giant beach ball and floating close enough to hold — as the horizon rotates from the sunny side to…

[This detailed story from VentureBeat describes a new Facebook-led project with the potential to increase a wide variety of presence experiences; see the original story for four more images and a 5:26 minute video (also available via YouTube). –Matthew] Facebook introduces dataset and benchmarks to make AI more ‘egocentric’ By Kyle Wiggers October 14, 2021 Facebook today announced Ego4D, a long-term project aimed at solving AI research challenges in “egocentric perception,” or first-person views. The goal is to teach AI systems to comprehend and interact with the world like humans do as opposed to in the third-person, omniscient way that…

[Drawing on a longer July 2021 article in The New York Times, this story from DIYPhotography describes a popular location in rural China that recreates a “bygone gentle village atmosphere” that only some of its visitors realize is staged. The author notes that the main issue is transparency – “If I go to a place and take photographs I want to know that what I’m witnessing is either real or staged” – but that “Perhaps we are all guilty of this to a degree, nothing is as it seems, and we are all perhaps a little too intent on capturing the…

[This very short DesignTAXI story describes a prototype controller designed to enhance presence (note the last sentence). The original includes more images and a three-minute Microsoft Research video (also available via YouTube) and for more information see the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) 2021 paper and 7:51 minute video presentation. –Matthew] Microsoft Showcases VR Controller That Adapts To Let You ‘Touch’ Items In Games By Ell Ko 13 October 2021 Microsoft Research has just developed an innovative new virtual reality (VR) controller that changes shape according to how it’s being held and used. Described as a…