ISPR Presence News

Monthly Archives: January 2022

Call: IVA 2022 – 22nd ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents

Call for Papers

IVA 2022
22nd ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents
University of Algarve, Faro, Portugal
September 6th-9th, 2022
https://ivaconference2022.ualg.pt/

Submission deadline: May 2, 2022

The Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA) Annual Conference is the premier international event for interdisciplinary research on the design, application, and evaluation of Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs) with a specific focus on the ability to socially interact. IVAs are interactive characters that exhibit human-like qualities including communicating using natural human modalities such as facial expressions, speech, and gesture.

IVA 2022 aims to showcase cutting-edge research on the design, application, and evaluation of IVAs, as well as the basic research underlying the technology that supports human-agent interaction such as social perception, dialog modeling, and social behavior planning. This year, we particularly encourage submissions exploring the challenges of developing, authoring, and deploying multi-IVA reusable environments targeted both at expert and non-expert users.… read more. “Call: IVA 2022 – 22nd ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents”

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Augmented reality theater takes a bow. In your kitchen.

[Apologies for the pause in posts last week, which was due to the sudden ‘death’ of my home computer. This story from The New York Times provides a link-filled update on innovative uses of presence in theater; see the original version for three more images. –Matthew]

[Image: Nubiya Brandon performing with the NuShape Orchestra in “All Kinds of Limbo.” Credit: .The National Theater]

Augmented Reality Theater Takes a Bow. In Your Kitchen.

The Immersive Storytelling Studio at the National Theater in London is using technology to bring a miniature musical to viewers’ homes. It’s one of several high-tech British projects pushing dramatic boundaries.

By Andrew Dickson
January 21, 2022

LONDON — Standing in front of a golden bandstand, dressed in a white satin gown and pearls, the vocalist Nubiya Brandon sashayed to a gentle beat. Stepping toward the spotlight, she took a lazy turn around the stage, singing a playful calypso number and smiling occasionally at the band behind.… read more. “Augmented reality theater takes a bow. In your kitchen.”

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Call: CHI 2022 Workshop on Collaborative Virtual Training for Challenging Contexts

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS

CHI ’22 Workshop on Collaborative Virtual Training for Challenging Contexts
April 25, 2022
Online (CHI is a hybrid conference in/from New Orleans, LA)
Workshop: https://xcelab.tech-experience.at/CHI22-workshop.html
CHI 2022: https://chi2022.acm.org/

Important dates:

  • Submission deadline (11:59pm, AoE): February 24, 2022
  • Notification of acceptance: March 10, 2022 (subject to change, depending on the deadline for early bird registrations)
  • One-day workshop (9AM – 5 PM) held online at CHI 2022, April 25, 2022

Dear colleagues,

We are happy to invite you to our workshop on Collaborative Virtual Training for Challenging Contexts. Please find all important information and the description below.

About the workshop

Virtual reality provides great opportunities to simulate various environments and situations as reproducible and controllable training environments. Recently, we have seen considerable effort to use virtual training environments (VTEs) in many demanding training contexts, e.g. police training, medical first responder training, firefighter training, etc.… read more. “Call: CHI 2022 Workshop on Collaborative Virtual Training for Challenging Contexts”

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Presence predictions: Second Life founder returns to revamp his original metaverse

[The CNET story below details the current views and predictions of Philip Rosedale, the founder of Second Life, regarding virtual reality and the metaverse. Fast Company’s story, “Second Life’s creator is back to build a ‘metaverse that doesn’t harm people,’“ includes these additional details and quotes:

“Rosedale tells me he fears that the mistakes of Web 2.0—such as the surveillance-based advertising used by Meta/Facebook—will carry over into the web’s next paradigm. He says there are better ways to make money in the metaverse. ‘Second Life is a demonstration of a model that works,’ he says. ‘It makes lots of money per person, it has a free tier, and it makes money charging people small fees on transactions, hosting fees, and land fees.’ ‘It’s possible to build a version of the metaverse that doesn’t harm people but actually can help with the problems we have now with divisiveness and misinformation,’ he says. … read more. “Presence predictions: Second Life founder returns to revamp his original metaverse”

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Call: “Reflections on human-human interaction and responsibility in a virtual environment” at BPMDS 2022

Call for Papers

The 23d International Working Conference on Business Process Modeling, Development, and Support (BPMDS’2022)
Theme: “Reflections on human-human interaction and responsibility in a virtual environment”
Held in conjunction with CAiSE’2022
6-7 June 2022
Leuven, Belgium
BPMDS’2022: http://www.bpmds.org
CAiSE’2022: https://caise22.ugent.be/

Submission deadline: March 7th, 2022

SPONSORS:

  • Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE). BPMDS is linked on an ongoing basis to the CAiSE conference series since 2011.
  • International Federation for Information Processing Working Group 8.1 (IFIP WG 8.1).
  • BPMDS proceedings are published in a Springer LNBIP proceedings volume, “Enterprise, Business-Process and Information Systems Modeling”, since 2009.

The Business Process Modeling, Development and Support (BPMDS) working conference has been held for more than two decades, dealing with, and promoting research on BPMDS. It has been a platform for a multitude of influential research papers. In keeping with its tradition, the working conference covers a broad range of theoretical and application-based research on BPMDS.… read more. “Call: “Reflections on human-human interaction and responsibility in a virtual environment” at BPMDS 2022”

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Is the ‘uncanny valley’ good for a future metaverse?

[Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori and other experts comment on the application of the uncanny valley phenomenon in the shared virtual spaces of a metaverse in this story from The Mainichi. An introduction to the uncanny valley in a November 2021 story from Discover includes this passage that includes examples and refers to a new paper about different explanations for the phenomenon:

“When we spoke by Zoom, [Karl] MacDorman, a world-renowned expert in human-computer interaction, showed me several robots that tend to drop into the uncanny valley but do not come close to being humanlike. One was less humanlike than R2D2, but still managed, perhaps by virtue of its appearing to have four eyes, to evoke the uncanny feeling in many observers. ‘You can get into the uncanny at all levels of humanness,’ MacDorman says. Take, for example, the Telenoid, a teleoperated android designed by Japanese roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro.… read more. “Is the ‘uncanny valley’ good for a future metaverse?”

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Call: Yearbook of Moving Image Studies – “Mixed Reality Images: Trilogy of Synthetic Realities III” (2022)

Call for Abstracts/Articles

Yearbook of Moving Image Studies (2022)
»Mixed Reality Images: Trilogy of Synthetic Realities III«

Deadline for Abstracts: April 22, 2022
Deadline for Articles: October 21, 2022

The double-blind peer-reviewed Yearbook of Moving Image Studies (YoMIS) is now accepting articles from researchers, artists, designers, technical developers, graphic artists, computer scientists, game designers and film makers for the seventh issue, which is the final part of the »Trilogy of Synthetic Realities« concept, entitled »Mixed Reality Images. Trilogy of Synthetic Realities III«. The first issue has focussed on »Virtual Images« (in 2020), the second on »Augmented Images« (in 2021) and with the third issue the editors will address the aesthetics, cognition, and technological structure of »Mixed Reality Images«. YoMIS will be enriched by disciplines like media theory, film studies and philosophy, art and design, artistic research, image science, semiotics, phenomenology, art history, game studies, visual culture studies, computer graphics and other research areas related to moving, dynamic, virtual, augmented, or mixed reality images in general.… read more. “Call: Yearbook of Moving Image Studies – “Mixed Reality Images: Trilogy of Synthetic Realities III” (2022)”

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The maker of Pokemon Go says the metaverse should take you outside

[As this Fast Company story explains, an extended ad titled “Meet You Out There” is part of a brand campaign from the company behind Pokemon Go and other AR games to advance its vision of using technology to augment rather than replace the real world, bringing people together outside instead of in a potentially dystopian metaverse. See the original story for a different image and the 2:07 minute ad (also available on YouTube). –Matthew]

The maker of Pokemon Go says the metaverse should take you outside

Niantic, the augmented reality gaming company behind Pokemon Go, lays out its vision for the metaverse in its first-ever ad campaign.

By Jeff Beer
November 17, 2021

Before Faceboo, er, Meta and Microsoft unveiled their high-profile and ambitious visions for the metaverse in October, Niantic founder and CEO John Hanke wrote a company blog post titled, “The Metaverse is a Dystopian Nightmare.read more. “The maker of Pokemon Go says the metaverse should take you outside”

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Call: Free online event: EDUBOTS: Best practice of chatbots in higher education – Findings and insights from 2 years of applied research

Call for Participation

EDUBOTS: “Best practice of chatbots in higher education” – Findings and insights from 2 years of applied research
Free online event
Tuesday January 18, 2022
7:00 AM – 10:00 AM EST [follow the registration link below to see the time in your location –ML]
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/best-practice-of-chatbots-in-higher-education-tickets-228807678927

ABOUT THIS EVENT

This edu conference gives you a “best of” overview of all insights the EDUBOTS consortium has gained from conducting two years of applied research that span across Europe. As part of the conference we will also release the “Chatbots for Education – CMOOC 2.0”.

Agenda of Topics (times are in CET):

1:00 PM
Opening – EDUBOTS Conference
Lars Willner, Differ.chat

1:10 PM
Release of cMOOC 2.0: Best practice of Chatbots in Higher Education
Gregor Jarisch, EDUBOTS Project Manager

1:20 PM
“Five years since chatbots become popular; How much impact did Chatbots have in higher education overall?read more. “Call: Free online event: EDUBOTS: Best practice of chatbots in higher education – Findings and insights from 2 years of applied research”

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When art transports us, where do we actually go?

[Without using the term explicitly, this essay from Psyche elegantly describes (tele)presence experiences, including the requirement that they begin with an external stimulus and that they involve a subtle dual awareness of mediated and nonmediated realities. See the original version for a second image and a video. –Matthew]

[Image: Detail of The Hunters in the Snow (1565), by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Credit: Courtesy the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna]

When art transports us, where do we actually go?

By Harri Mäcklin, a postdoctoral researcher of aesthetics at the University of Helsinki in Finland. His research interests include phenomenology, hermeneutics, and the history of aesthetics.
January 11, 2022

An old Chinese legend tells of the painter Wu Daozi (680-c760), who learned to paint so vividly that he was finally able to step inside his work and vanish into the landscape.… read more. “When art transports us, where do we actually go?”

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