[This story from Forbes reports on the first-place winner of the $10 million ANA Avatar XPRIZE competition, a team from the University of Bonn and their telepresence robot NimbRo; our colleague Jacki Morie is quoted extensively in the story. There’s more information in the EurekAlert! press release and especially on the NimbRo website, which features many pictures and videos. Coverage in SpaceNews provides this interesting context about the motivations for the competition sponsor, the largest airline in Japan: “’When we think about the world that we live in right now, where only about 6% of the population can travel over…

[This BBC News story describes efforts to use presence-evoking VR to prepare students for job interviews with prospective employers (who may also use VR to conduct interviews). Coverage from Inavate includes this: “Users get feedback on their answers, as well as how the answer was given, whether the interviewee is maintaining eye contact with the avatar as well as the participant’s posture throughout the interview. The trial will see more than 10,000 learners accessing the experience, with findings due to be published in January 2023. Sandwell College, a UK based school, took part in the programme, with 84% of participants…

[A new company lead by ex-Google AI experts is bringing the latest chatbot technology directly to consumers so that they can experience medium-as-social-actor presence with a wide variety of personas, despite the inherent dangers of “bias, inaccuracy, and people’s tendency to ‘anthropomorphize and extend social expectations to nonhuman agents,’ even when they’re explicitly aware that they are interacting with an AI.” The details (and in the original version, examples and more images) are provided in this story from The Washington Post. See also the closely related Yahoo! News story “An Elon Musk chatbot tells Insider he wants to buy CNN,…

[Despite its extreme and disturbing nature, a new blog post by the virtual reality pioneer who founded Oculus about his creation of an apparently operational VR headset that can kill the user raises interesting questions about the potential blurring of physical and virtual experience. The story from Vice below provides the basic details, and a March 2021 story from Futurism notes Palmer Luckey’s earlier interest in games that can kill. New stories in Road to VR and Ars Technica note and link to examples of less severe but still impactful consequences for user failures in virtual reality. And We Got…

[If you’re a David Byrne and/or Talking Heads fan like me you’ll be especially interested in this story from Westword that describes his latest project, a personalized, experiential, immersive experience inspired by neuroscience experiments that illustrate the subjective nature of perception and memory. Note the hopeful message at the end of the story. See the original version for a 30 second promotional video and Colorado Springs Indy for a 43 minute Radiolab interview with Byrne about the project. –Matthew] David Byrne’s Mind-Bending, Multi-Sensory Theater of the Mind Is Open in Denver By Emily Ferguson August 29, 2022 What is reality?…

[TechCrunch reports on a startup company offering another alternative to Zoom and other collaboration platforms. The Roam “office building in the cloud” is said to provide an overview of where distributed team members are and what they’re working on, which the CEO calls “project presence.” See the original story for a second image and coverage in CNBC for more details including these: “[CEO Howard] Lerman was inspired to found Roam after he accidentally forgot to invite a co-worker to a large Zoom call, he said. He realized there was no way for an outsider to tell that people were meeting,…