[With BMW’s M Mixed Reality system, the driver of a real car on a real road wears an immersive head mounted display in which they see a digitally augmented virtual version of the real road. The author of this story from Car & Driver tried it out and reports on his presence experience. See the original story for three more images, a 3:14 minute Car & Driver video of the experience, and a second 1:13 minute BMW video (also available on YouTube).

NOTE: ISPR Presence News will be on hiatus for the next two weeks but will return on December 26.  –Matthew]

I Drove a Real-Life BMW M2 on a Virtual Racetrack and Survived

Wearing a VR headset and wheeling the new M2 on a closed course, I tried BMW’s mind-bending M Mixed Reality.

By Eric Stafford
December 6, 2022

Driving a real car while wearing a virtual reality (VR) headset is almost always a terrible idea.… read more. “BMW’s “mind-bending” M Mixed Reality: What it’s like to drive a real car on a virtual racetrack”

[Hiroshima University psychologist Mayu Koike and her colleagues are studying the potential positive effects of relationships with computer generated personae; they hope to “cultivate a new field named ‘romantic anthropomorphism,’ bridging the gap between anthropomorphism and relationship science.” Interesting details are reported in this story from WebMD.  –Matthew]

Loving a Fake Person: Redefining Romance for the Virtual Age

By Bill Stieg
December 2, 2022

When a young man finds himself falling for a 300-year-old cyborg in the 2019 sci-fi film Alita: Battle Angel, they share the following exchange:

“Does it bother you,” the cyborg (Alita) asks, “that I’m not completely human?”

“You are the most human person I have ever met,” the young man (Hugo) replies.

Cinema is filled with examples like this, of humans hitting it off with non-humans. See also the 2013 film Her, in which Joaquin Phoenix falls for a virtual assistant voiced by Scarlett Johansson, and the 2014 sci-fi flick Ex Machina, where a young programmer (Domhnall Gleeson) grows close to an AI robot that happens to resemble a beautiful woman (Alicia Vikander).… read more. “Loving a fake person: Redefining romance for the virtual age”

[This story from Virginia Commonwealth University describes an ideal use case for presence-evoking virtual reality: a common medical procedure that’s difficult to perform and expensive and risky to learn with human patients. The story also makes clear the importance of having an interdisciplinary university (or other) infrastructure supporting this kind of valuable project. More information is available on the website of VCU’s Launching Excellent in VR (LEVR) Center. –Matthew]

[Image: Credit: Karl Steinbrenner]

How virtual reality training may improve ‘blind’ surgery to treat female urinary incontinence

VCU’s Lauren Siff leads interdisciplinary effort to build a virtual-reality training application to help surgeons prepare for a widely used procedure.

By Jeff Kelley
December. 6, 2022

For the 1 in 3 women who experience urinary incontinence, treatment often comes in the form of surgery: implanting a device called a midurethral sling. The sling stops uncontrolled urination during physical activity, such as lifting or laughing.… read more. “How virtual reality training may improve ‘blind’ surgery to treat female urinary incontinence”

[The latest artificial intelligence-chatbot, ChatGPT, is impressing experts and the public but also raising serious concerns, as reported in the story below from The New York Times (where the original includes examples of chat transcripts). Coverage from Slate characterizes the progress ChatGPT represents this way:

“[W]e’ve come a long way from the early days of the chatbot hype wave. Not long ago, Facebook promised these bots would be its next big platform, Microsoft pitched them as fun companions, and others raced to claim credit for leading the revolution. But these chatbots were so bad that people stopped using them. With ChatGPT, we’re witnessing a significant advance in public, conversational A.I. This opens the door for a new wave of chatbot innovation, perhaps the kind many hoped for but had failed to materialize. At least until now.”

While focusing on its flaws, Mashable’s coverage notes that “What makes ChatGPT stand out from the pack is its gratifying ability to handle feedback about its answers, and revise them on the fly.… read more. “ChatGPT, the best AI chatbot ever released to the general public, inspires awe and concern”

[This Washington Post story describes a partnership between Storyfile and Proto, two companies that create technologies to evoke presence (and which have been the subject of previous ISPR Presence News posts). The story says a new life-like hologram of Walmart founder Sam Walton at the company’s museum in Arkansas “hints at a new frontier, one in which long-dead icons mingle among us, head-spinningly erasing the line between not just virtual and real but present and past, dead and alive.” –Matthew]

[Image: A hologram of Walmart founder Sam Walton holds court in front of a room in Bentonville, Ark., right before Thanksgiving. The piece comes at the head of a new wave of lifelike recreations of dead icons. Credit: Steven Zeitchik]

At Walmart, Sam Walton’s hologram hints at Black Friday’s future

A slew of dead founders, patriarchs and presidents mingling among us is suggested in the company’s hometown

By Steven Zeitchik
November 25, 2022

It was just a couple days before Black Friday, and a group of visitors to a Walmart museum had some questions for Sam Walton.… read more. “At Walmart, Sam Walton’s hologram hints at future of dead founders, patriarchs and presidents mingling among us”