[Based on this Los Angeles Times story the Velaslavasay Panorama has expanded and prospered since a July 2015 ISPR Presence News post during the 10th anniversary of the “strange and immersive” attraction, when the artic painting “Effulgence of the North” was on display. I hope to have the presence experiences it offers on my first post-pandemic trip home to L.A. this January. See the original version of the story below for seven more images. –Matthew]

[Image: Credit: Madeleine Hordinski / Los Angeles Times]

Exploring weird L.A.: The strange, immersive art of the Velaslavasay Panorama

By Deborah Netburn
October 4, 2021

On a modest residential street in L.A.’s University Park neighborhood sits an old silent movie theater painted an eye-popping shade of aquamarine.

The historic building has housed a storefront church and a drama school and for four decades served as headquarters for the tile layers union, Local 18.… read more. “Exploring weird L.A.: The strange, immersive art of the Velaslavasay Panorama”

[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 2016, and Jordan Belamire was excited to experience QuiVr, a new fantastical virtual reality game, for the first time. With her husband and brother-in-law looking on, she put on a VR headset and became immersed in a snowy landscape. Represented by a disembodied set of floating hands along with a quiver, bow, and hood, Belamire was now tasked with taking up her weapons to fight mesmerizing hordes of glowing monsters.… read more. “Taking cues from gaming and the real-world to create proactive governance in the metaverse”

[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, virtual concerts and communal gaming often rely on smart TVs — turning the living room back into a place to socialize with friends, even if they’re not actually there.

• “The advent of the pandemic meant that pretty much everyone faced the same problem: How can I easily spend time with friends and family online without it becoming a technical ballache?,”

[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 the dark side of the lunar surface.

Speed out to beyond the solar system and swing by Saturn, then up above the Milky Way, swirling and flashing and heaving — with exoplanets highlighted in red.

Much farther out, imagine floating through small dots of light that represent galaxies as if the viewer were an unconscionably large giant floating in space.… read more. “Beta software lets you explore the universe in ‘real-time,’ 3D, 360 degree VR”

[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 most AI currently does.

It’s Facebook’s assertion that AI that understands the world from first-person could enable previously impossible augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) experiences. But computer vision models, which would form the basis of this AI, have historically learned from millions of photos and videos captured in third-person.… read more. “Facebook introduces dataset and benchmarks to make AI more ‘egocentric’”