ISPR Presence News

Monthly Archives: February 2022

Call: Second International Conference on ICT for Health, Accessibility and Wellbeing (IHAW 2022)

Call for Papers

Second International Conference on ICT for Health, Accessibility and Wellbeing (IHAW 2022)
December 5-7, 2022
Golden Bay Beach Hotel 5*, Larnaca, Cyprus
https://cyprusconferences.org/ihaw2022

Submission deadline: July 18, 2022 (AoE)

ICT for Health, Accessibility and Wellbeing (IHAW 2022) is the second of the series of International Conferences on “ICT for Societal Challenges”. It is a showcase for high quality oral and poster presentations and demonstrations sessions. This conference aims to be a platform for multi and interdisciplinary research at the interplay between Information and Communication Technologies, Biomedical, Neuro-cognitive, and Experimental research.

This research includes the design, experimental evaluation and standardization of new ICT scalable systems and in-silico systems for new and future inclusive and sustainable technologies that benefit all: healthy people, people with disabilities or other impairments, people having chronic diseases, etc. User-centered design and innovation, new intuitive ways of human-computer interaction, and user acceptance are the topics of particular interest.… read more. “Call: Second International Conference on ICT for Health, Accessibility and Wellbeing (IHAW 2022)”

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Why you can’t have legs in virtual reality (yet)

[Despite recent improvements in virtual reality technology, users’ avatars still don’t have legs due to the difficulty of realistic tracking of full body movements. This CNN report describes the challenges and prospects for progress; note the explicit use of the term presence without the need for a definition, and the references to the uncanny valley at the end. The original version of the story includes a video and more images. –Matthew]

[Image: Avatar bodies in Meta’s Horizon Worlds VR app are limited to floating torsos with head, hands, and arms.]

Why you can’t have legs in virtual reality (yet)

By Rachel Metz, CNN Business
February 15, 2022

CNN —  Mark Zuckerberg stares at a cartoon version of himself in a virtual world and tries to pick an outfit for his avatar to wear. Zuckerberg flicks his hand to change the avatar’s apparel, switching from a black shirt, slacks and white sneakers to a skeleton costume to an astronaut suit.… read more. “Why you can’t have legs in virtual reality (yet)”

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Call: ISMAR 2022 – IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality

[Note: See conference website for other Calls. –ML]

CALLS FOR JOURNAL PAPERS

ISMAR 2022: IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality
October 17-21, 2022
Singapore
https://ismar2022.org/call-for-journal-papers/

OVERVIEW

The IEEE ISMAR is the leading international academic conference in the fields of Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality. The symposium is organized and supported by the IEEE Computer Society, IEEE VGTC and ACM SIGGRAPH. The first ISMAR conference was held in 2002 in Darmstadt, Germany. The creation of the conference emerged from the fusion of two former academic events dedicated to this research field: the International Symposium on Augmented Reality (ISAR) and the International Symposium on Mixed Reality (ISMR).

As initiated last year, ISMAR 2022 will have two different calls for papers. This first call will be for submission to the TVCG journal paper track. These papers will be published in a special issue of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG).… read more. “Call: ISMAR 2022 – IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality”

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The Green Planet AR Experience: BBC series-inspired immersive event takes visitors to six Earth biomes

[A new and popular presence experience has opened for a short run in London, as described below in an abridged version of a Broadcast story followed by more details from XR Today. More images and a 38-second trailer are available in both stories (the trailer is also on YouTube). See also the BBC Studios press release. For a story about a related presence experience on a digital billboard in Piccadilly Circle see coverage in The Evening Standard. –Matthew]

Behind the scenes at The Green Planet AR Experience

Broadcast takes a tour of the AR-driven spin-off of the BBC NHU series and speaks to the immersive experience creator, Factory 42

By Jake Bickerton
15 February 2022

An ambitious AR experience linked to the BBC’s The Green Planet series has opened in Piccadilly, London.

The Green Planet AR Experience has been two years in the making and has taken over the former site of Tower Records for the next month.… read more. “The Green Planet AR Experience: BBC series-inspired immersive event takes visitors to six Earth biomes”

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Call: Hybrid Workshop: “What is Proprioceptive Art?”

Call for Registration

Hybrid-Workshop: “What is Proprioceptive Art?”
9-11 March 2022
University of Duesseldorf
https://proprioceptive.art

What is Proprioceptive Art?

Many works of art are predominantly visual or auditory in nature (visual arts such as drawing, painting, photography or performing arts like music). Only some art works (happenings, fluxus, performance) might also crucially involve the audience’s own physicality and thereby intentionally provoke the recipients’ perception of their own body, i.e. their proprioceptions.

In the context of the workshop, we want to debate a radical question: Could there be works of art that are either primarily or predominantly proprioceptive in nature: i.e., that have the perception of one’s own bodily movement, position in space, balance, muscle tension, pain, temperature, energy and stress levels, etc., at their core: Is proprioceptive art possible?

PROGRAMME

9th of March:

  • Markus Schrenk – Is Proprioceptive Art possible?
  • Charles Spence – Proprioceptive Pleasures

10th of March:

  • Jiri Benovsky – Erotic Art as Proprioceptive Art
  • Ksenia Fedorova – Distributed Self: Artistic Tactics of Sensing Across and Beyond the Bodily Boundaries
  • Svetlana Chernyshova – Bodies in Motion.
read more. “Call: Hybrid Workshop: “What is Proprioceptive Art?””
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Charting a future of autonomous, lifelike digital humans

[This TechCrunch story provides an update on the work of digital humans startup Soul Machines. Particularly notable is a description of the company’s “Levels of Autonomous Animation Framework to Improve Human and Machine Collaboration” (from a free online whitepaper) and its vision of a future in which we all can create realistic digital twins of ourselves to interact with the world in our place. See the original story for four more images. –Matthew]

Are lifelike digital humans the future of customer experience?

By Rebecca Bellan
February 14, 2022

Soul Machines, a New Zealand-based company that uses CGI, AI and natural language processing to create lifelike digital people who can interact with humans in real time, has raised $70 million in a Series B1 round, bringing its total funding to $135 million. The startup will put the funds toward enhancing its Digital Brain technology, which uses a technique called “cognitive modeling” to recreate things like the human brain’s emotional response system in order to construct autonomous animated characters.… read more. “Charting a future of autonomous, lifelike digital humans”

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Call: 2nd International Conference on Interactive Media, Smart Systems and Emerging Technologies (IMET 2022)

Call for Papers

2nd International Conference on Interactive Media, Smart Systems and Emerging Technologies (IMET 2022)
Technical co-sponsored by IEEE Computer Society (Approval is Pending)
4-7 October 2022
Limassol (main conference) and Nicosia (exhibition), Cyprus
https://imet.cyens.org.cy/

Submission deadlines:

  • Paper: 8th March 2022
  • Short Paper, Poster: 16th April 2022
  • Demo: 16th May 2022
  • Workshop proposal: 15th April 2022

IMET is the flagship conference of CYENS Centre of Excellence (http://www.cyens.org.cy). CYENS constitutes a centre of excellence and a joint venture between the three public universities of Cyprus (University of Cyprus, Cyprus University of Technology and Open University of Cyprus), the Municipality of Nicosia, the Max Planck Institute for Informatics (Germany) and University College London (UK).

The conference is dedicated to the exploration of current practices in the use of emerging and interactive technologies. The interdisciplinary research topics presented and discussed at IMET render it a rather unique venue that promotes a dearly needed blend of technology and applied research.… read more. “Call: 2nd International Conference on Interactive Media, Smart Systems and Emerging Technologies (IMET 2022)”

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Many prefer VR to in-person therapy, new research shows

[This story from The Debrief expands on a press release from Edith Cowan University about a new study demonstrating advantages of interacting with an avatar rather than a nonmediated therapist; note the proposed explanations for the key finding in the indented paragraph before the “OUTLOOK…” heading. –Matthew]

[Image: Source: Edith Cowan University]

MANY PREFER VR TO IN-PERSON THERAPY, NEW RESEARCH SHOWS

By Raquel Santos
February 15, 2022

Is the idea of openly speaking in front of a therapist too intimidating for you? New research says that you’re not alone in this… and that many people feel more comfortable speaking to an avatar than being in person with a therapist.

In a recent study by Edith Cowan University (ECU), researchers found that 30 percent of people [prefer to] talk about their negative experiences with a virtual reality character, instead of a real person.… read more. “Many prefer VR to in-person therapy, new research shows”

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Call: EC-TEL 2022: 17th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning

CALL FOR PAPERS

EC-TEL 2022: Seventeenth European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning
Theme: Educating for a new future: Making sense of technology-enhanced learning adoption
Toulouse, France
12-16 September 2022
https://ea-tel.eu/ectel2022/cfp

Submission deadlines:

  • Research papers, Posters, and Demonstrations: 24 March 2022 – Mandatory submission of an abstract
  • Workshops: 4 May 2022 – Submission of workshop proposal
  • Doctoral Consortium: To be announced

The European Conference on Technology-Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL) engages researchers, practitioners, educational developers, entrepreneurs, industry leaders and policy makers to address current challenges and advances in the field. EC-TEL 2022 will take place on 12-16 September 2022 in Toulouse, France with the theme “Educating for a new future: Making sense of technology-enhanced learning adoption”.

We invite contributions for research papers, posters, demonstrations, as well as workshops. A doctoral consortium will be organised concurrently with the workshops. The topics of interest for the conference can be found here.… read more. “Call: EC-TEL 2022: 17th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning”

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Promise and peril: Education meets the metaverse

[The Brookings Institution is a Washington, D.C. “nonprofit public policy organization” whose mission is “to conduct in-depth research that leads to new ideas for solving problems facing society at the local, national and global level.” Below is the first part of an extensive new Brookings policy brief on the promise and peril of the application of presence-evoking technologies of the ‘metaverse’ in education. See the original, unabridged version on the Brookings website and/or download it in pdf format. –Matthew]

A whole new world: Education meets the metaverse

By Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Jennifer M. Zosh, Helen Shwe Hadani, Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, Kevin Clark, Chip Donohue, and Ellen Wartella
February 14, 2022

The metaverse is upon us. Soon it will be as omnipresent as TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook (now Meta). As technology advances to bring us new immersive and imaginary worlds, how we educate children and prepare teachers must also advance to meet these new opportunities.… read more. “Promise and peril: Education meets the metaverse”

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