[The mixed reactions to a digital recreation of beloved baseball announcer Harry Caray, at a game celebrating a much-loved film about “a farmer who builds a baseball field in his cornfield that attracts the ghosts of baseball legends” (Wikipedia), illustrate the challenges of creating effective presence illusions of people who have died. The report below is from The Washington Post, where the original includes more pictures, video clips and Tweets; find more reactions in coverage from TV Insider, CBS Sports and Sports Illustrated. Note that the reactions seem to have been more positive in the stadium than on social media…

[Many of us have had the strange experience in which the recorded music we’re listening to (e.g., in headphones or earbuds while walking) coincidentally seems to match up with the environment we’re moving through. This story from Creative Boom describes a new purposeful effort to create these matches between mediated and nonmediated elements of our experience, a type of presence illusion. See the original story for several different pictures and a 1:06 minute promotional video (also available via YouTube) and see the “Projects” page of the Circus Family website for other interesting presence-related projects such as “Vlisco – We are…

[This Associated Press story describes some of the ways people around the world have been using technology and presence to experience religious sites and rituals, including during the pandemic. See the original version of the story for six more pictures and a video. –Matthew] [Image: This July 22, 2019 photo taken from video gives a 360-degree view of Ramadan prayers on the plateau of the Dome of the Rock, which can be seen in The Holy City, a virtual reality experience in the metaverse. Credit: The Holy City VR via AP] From Mecca to the Vatican, exploring sacred sites with…

[A project and publication from University of York researchers focuses on how to design audio experiences in virtual reality to create more effective presence experiences. See the original version of the story for a 1:46 minute gameplay demonstration (also available on YouTube) and find more videos in the article’s supplementary material. –Matthew] [Image: Figure 3 from Constantin Popp et al., Creating Audio Object-Focused Acoustic Environments for Room-Scale Virtual Reality, Applied Sciences (2022). DOI: 10.3390/app12147306. Screenshot showing an area in Planet Xerilia. The collision-based system is implemented in the “water” droplets, here visible as randomly rotated white small squares, which fall…

[A new app for Quest headsets uses passthrough augmented reality as well as virtual reality, along with hand tracking, to teach people how to play the piano, as reported in this story from Classic FM. See the original version for the mentioned 9:29 minute video review (also available on YouTube) as well as a shorter demonstration video. For more details, see coverage from UploadVR. –Matthew] [Image: Source: UploadVR] Music in the Metaverse – learn to play the piano in this new augmented reality app This new VR game is the piano’s answer to Guitar Hero, but the controller is your…

[Here’s a fascinating story about new evidence demonstrating that virtual reality can evoke “self-transcendence” – a “sense of deep connectedness and ego attenuation” (which sounds like a rich form of social as well as spatial presence) that is also created by “LSD or psilocybin (the main psychoactive component of ‘magic’ mushrooms).” See the original story in MIT Technology Review for a 1:13 minute video (also available via Vimeo). –Matthew] [Image: Credit: MS TECH | SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY (CT/MRI IMAGE)] VR is as good as psychedelics at helping people reach transcendence On key metrics, a VR experience elicited a response indistinguishable…