[The post title is from ARTNews but the story below is from the Miami Herald, and it describes the latest version of an intriguing “presence and food” experience reported in a September 2019 ISPR Presence News post. The ARTNews story includes this: “’How do you visualize taste? What is the shape of spice? What is the color of flavor?’ [Creator Mattia] Casalegno said in an interview, describing his project. ‘I conceived Aerobanquets RMX as a total feast for the senses, a multi-sensory journey, a tool to reprogram all our perceptive expectations.’ … Casalegno first conceived of Aerobanquets in 2018 with the…

[This NBC News story describes how and why Morehouse College Professor Ovell Hamilton has created a unique course on Black history that will be taught next spring entirely via virtual reality, taking students to key places and events using 3D simulations and avatars designed to evoke spatial and social presence and enhance learning. See the original version of the story for five more images and a short video.  –Matthew] [Image: Students at Morehouse College are able to experience a virtual slave ship through virtual reality technology. Credit: Morehouse College] Morehouse College class will teach Black history in the metaverse Students…

[The brief story below from My Modern Net describes a project by Istanbul lawyer and photographer Alper Yesiltas in which he uses AI and other software to create realistic images of what celebrities who died years ago would look like today, “brought back to life as if nothing happened.” See the original story for the ten images. His most recent project, which Yesiltas presents in a Bored Panda post, is called “Thisness” (“[t]he quality in a thing of being here and now or such as it is”) and features 17 images that address the question “What would some iconic people…

[In this story from The Conversation a physicist explains some of the current arguments and evidence for the idea that all of our experience is the result of the ultimate form of presence – that the universe itself “is a computer simulation, with someone (perhaps an advanced alien species) fine-tuning the conditions.” The author argues that we should take the possibility seriously and describes new efforts to prove or disprove it; whether that happens or not, our collective fascination with the idea is entirely consistent with the fact that we live in an era when our technologies increasingly provide convincing…

[This story about another beneficial application of presence experiences comes from the Cornell Chronicle; note the involvement of our colleague Andrea Stevenson Won. See the original version for a second image. –Matthew] [Image: Kim Benowski, left, a staff member from Cornell’s Center for Teaching Innovation, helps a student use a VR headset as she learns a complicated microscope technique in a molecular biology and genetics class. Credit: Sreang Hok/Cornell University] Students visit virtual world to learn research technique By Kathy Hovis, a writer for the College of Arts and Sciences November 22, 2022 Safely and effectively preparing a sample for…

[Without using the term, this story from Unite.ai examines (and provides links to other stories about) a range of potential causes and potential effects of our medium-as-social-actor presence responses to different types of robots. –Matthew] Emotional Attachment to Robots: Why Does It Happen, and Does It Matter? By Zac Amos November 17, 2022 Humans have been designing robots for a long time, and with advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), they will eventually exceed expectations with their abilities. Though humans desire them for their practical uses, such as deliveries or industry, experiments prove people get attached much like they would a…