[Non-player characters in games provide important information that brings the human player into the game setting and story. As Business Insider notes,

“One video game alone can have dozens — if not hundreds — of non-player characters, or NPCs. Controlled by a computer, these characters range from Tom Nook, who runs the village store in ‘Animal Crossing,’ to Zelda, the princess of Hyrule and namesake of the Nintendo series. Over the past few decades, the graphics and basic dialogue of these characters may have advanced, but the interactions can still feel static and scripted.”

To make interactions with NPCs more immersive (i.e., to evoke richer, more natural social presence experiences for players), Nvidia has incorporated the use of real-time, voice-based AI, as described in the story below from Tom’s Hardware. See the original version for the mentioned videos (available on YouTube here and here), and for more information read the Nvidia press release, project webpage and developer blog entry.… read more. “Nvidia ACE brings AI to game characters, allows lifelike conversations”

[A multi-campus, cross-disciplinary, NSF-funded project is designed to make it easier for researchers to conduct studies of extended reality (XR) experiences and impacts using larger and more diverse sets of participants, as reported in this story from the University of Central Florida. See also a related press release from Lehigh University via Eurekalert! that links to a story about Lehigh Professor Valerie Jones Taylor’s “own research focused on the potential of VR to improve encounters between members of different races.” –Matthew]

UCF Leads Development of First Large-scale System for Extended Reality Research

The nearly $5 million project will facilitate human subjects research to improve extended reality technologies for the general population and make them more inclusive to groups such as older adults or people with disabilities.

By Robert Wells
April 25, 2023

A University of Central Florida researcher is leading a nearly $5 million U.S.… read more. “Virtual Experience Research Accelerator (VERA) is first large-scale system to improve XR human-subject research”

[In this essay for TechCrunch, virtual reality expert Jeremy Beilenson argues that virtual reality and other immersive media experiences are dangerously engaging and distracting and therefore do not belong in automobiles. –Matthew]

[Image: Credit: 5m3photos / Getty Images]

The other DWI: Driving while immersed

VR headsets have no place in moving automobiles

By Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab and author of “Experience on Demand: What Virtual Reality Is, How It Works, and What It Can Do.”
May 23, 2023

On May 17, Meta and BMW released a video hailing a joint research breakthrough that will allow virtual reality headsets to work in moving cars.

Because the companies have figured out how to track a person’s body movement independently of the car’s motion, passengers and drivers will be able to wear VR headsets to simultaneously see the road and digital content or be totally immersed in a virtual world.… read more. “The other DWI: Driving while immersed”

[Much of the coverage of the increasingly widespread use of artificial intelligence to generate music is about the complex legal and ethical issues involved (e.g., see Holland & Knight and Rolling Stone). But as the story below from Interesting Engineering notes, the fact that this music is generated by AI is “often not discernible to a follower or a fan,” which represents an important form of presence (a misperception of the role of technology in a mediated experience). An earlier story from Interesting Engineering titled “Scammer sells AI-generated Frank Ocean’s songs, makes thousands of dollars,” begins with this:

“We’ve definitely opened Pandora’s box when it comes to artificial intelligence (AI). What we’re witnessing in AI is the biggest shift in technology since the internet itself. For the musically inclined, this means we now live in a world where it’s hard to differentiate between a real artist’s voice and an AI-generated one, which is exactly what happened recently to Frank Ocean’s fans.… read more. “Presence and music: ‘New’ music from The Beatles and others via AI”

[This first-person report from Popular Mechanics describes a new laptop computer that has a large augmented reality display rather than a physical monitor. Particularly noteworthy quotes that refer indirectly to presence include that “it feels surprisingly natural to use, with the potential to usher in a new era of personal computer”; “Spacetop feels like it’s a physical display truly present in the space with you”; and “I enjoyed taking a Teams video call using the giant screen and the conversation felt incredibly immersive, like the effect you get from going to a movie theater.” The original version of the story includes more pictures and a 43 second video (also available on YouTube), and there are more first-person reports in PC Magazine, PC World and The Verge. A press release is available via BusinessWire. –Matthew]

Hands On With Spacetop, the First Augmented Reality Laptop

This computer uses AR glasses to simulate a multi-monitor workstation.… read more. “First-person report: Spacetop, the first augmented reality laptop”