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Author Archives: Matthew Lombard

Call: New Coordinates for Creative Hybrid Space-Experiences (two volume monograph)

[From Adrian Kvokacka (adrian.kvokacka@FF.UNIPO.SK)]

Dear All,

I am pleased to share two CFPs for the collective monograph entitled ‘New Coordinates for Creative Hybrid Space-Experiences: Environments, communities, identities, and art’ and ‘Experiences in Hybrid Spaces: Creation, Reception, Understanding’.

Basic Guidelines:

Deadline for submissions: August 31, 2023
Language of submissions: English (British)
Length of submissions: Up to 6000 words (references included)
Reference style: Chicago Manual of Style (15th ed.)
Format: Word (accompanied with an exported pdf file)
All submissions should be sent to: cfp@caphe.space

The calls are available below and also at the links:
Volume I.: https://shorturl.at/erwU4
Volume II.: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Uy1XyzIiIWjqPi905iaULiWEJ9JZ3gwT/view?usp=share_link

On behalf of co-editors Aleksandra Łukaszewicz-Alcaraz and Bogna J. Gladden-Obidzińska, Adrian Kvokacka

—–

Call for Papers:
New Coordinates for Creative Hybrid Space-Experiences: Environments, communities, identities, and art
read more. “Call: New Coordinates for Creative Hybrid Space-Experiences (two volume monograph)”

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People are creating records of fake historical events using AI

[This story from Motherboard describes a worrisome application of the fast-evolving ability of AI to generate convincingly realistic presence illusions, in this case of important but completely fictional events. Technology expert Shelly Palmer posted this reaction to the story on his blog:

“In George Orwell’s 1984, the book’s hero, Winston Smith, is a minor party functionary living in a London that is still shattered by a nuclear war that took place not long after World War II. He belongs to the Outer Party, and his job is to rewrite history in the Ministry of Truth, bringing it in line with current political thinking. […] Orwell’s novel highlights the dangers of totalitarianism and the importance of individual freedom and free thought. I don’t think anyone ever believed that rewriting history was going to be a real thing. Thanks to a few motivated individuals and their generative AI coworkers, Orwell’s dystopian world has arrived.”… read more. “People are creating records of fake historical events using AI”

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Call: ACM Symposium on Spatial User Interaction (SUI) 2023

Call for Papers

ACM SUI 2023
The 11th ACM International Symposium on Spatial User Interaction
Sydney, Australia
October 13-15, 2023
https://sui.acm.org/2023/

Submission deadlines:

  • Papers: June 23, 2023
  • Posters and demos: August 20, 2023
  • Workshops and special topic sessions: April 16, 2023

ACM SUI brings together top researchers and practitioners from around the world who focus on spatial interaction for Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality, and for ubiquitous, intelligent/smart and real environments. We invite contributions from a wide range of fields including design, social science, arts and creative Industries, and other application domains. This year we introduce a new track of workshops and special topic sessions that are organised by our participants to discuss more focused and/or emerging research and technical topics. Please refer to https://sui.acm.org/2023/ for more details.

We are also organising special issues with two prestigious SCI indexed journals.… read more. “Call: ACM Symposium on Spatial User Interaction (SUI) 2023”

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New virtual reality ‘death simulator’ lets users see what happens to them after they die

[This short story from Firstpost reports on a potentially disturbing but thought-provoking new art installation that provides a simulated first-person experience of death. More information about the installation and the artist who created it is available from the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV)’s Melbourne Now website. A 7:08 minute video, “Facing the Fear of Death in Virtual Reality,” is available on YouTube. And information about other highlights of the Melbourne Now event, including some related to presence, is available from the Australian Arts Review and the Herald Sun. A related, earlier simulation by “Beijing’s biggest funeral parlor” is described in a 2018 story in Sixth Tone. –Matthew]

[Image: Source: Herald Sun. Credit: Sean Fennessy]

New virtual reality ‘death simulator’ lets users see what happens to them after they die

By Mehul Reuben Das
March 28, 2023

As morbid and solemn as it can be, there are some who find death very fascinating.… read more. “New virtual reality ‘death simulator’ lets users see what happens to them after they die”

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Call: The Problems of Philosophy in Virtual Reality hybrid conference

Call for Participation

Conference: The Problems of Philosophy in Virtual Reality
May 22 & 23, 2023, from 9:30am to 5:00pm.
The Institute for Futures Studies, Stockholm, Sweden and online
Brought to you by: Stockholm University & the Institute for Futures Studies
To attend: please register at http://ww.iffs.se/realityplus

This event is open to the public.
Conference poster.

This conference will depart from and engage with the recent and critically acclaimed book Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy by Professor David Chalmers.

Chalmers’ book Reality+ takes as its starting point the recent advances in AI and computer hardware which have made high-quality virtual reality sets available to a wider audience. Chalmers notes that the quality and realism of such systems are likely to improve over time to the point where there may eventually be simulated worlds that are wholly indistinguishable from non-virtual worlds from the subjective point of view of the inhabitants of those worlds.… read more. “Call: The Problems of Philosophy in Virtual Reality hybrid conference”

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“Uncanny valley-leaping” facial animation: Epic’s new motion-capture tech has to be seen to be believed

[The era in which we can’t distinguish even high-definition video of real people from quickly and easily created computer-generated imagery (CGI) is fast approaching. The Ars Technica story below describes a recent demonstration of the MetaHuman Animator motion-capture animation technology this way: “Epic showed off the new machine-learning-powered system, which needed just a few minutes to generate impressively real, uncanny-valley-leaping facial animation from a simple head-on video taken on an iPhone.” The coverage in PC Gamer adds this:

“The potential here is huge. Not only will major studios be able to create facial animations in a fraction of the time, allowing for increasingly realistic interactions in upcoming games, but smaller developers will be able to create mocap-quality scenes with just a phone and a PC, instead of an entire studio full of 4D cameras and those little white dot things.”

See the original stories for the 5:08 minute video demonstration and 1:07 trailer the authors describe (also available on YouTube here and here).  … read more. ““Uncanny valley-leaping” facial animation: Epic’s new motion-capture tech has to be seen to be believed”

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Call: Cozy Games and Coziness in Digital Games for Replay. The Polish Journal of Game Studies

CALL FOR PAPERS

Cozy Games and Coziness in Digital Games
For Replay. The Polish Journal of Game Studies
https://czasopisma.uni.lodz.pl/Replay/cfp

Submission deadline: June 30, 2023

Replay. The Polish Journal of Game Studies invites all scholars to submit articles concerning cozy games and coziness in games.

Undoubtedly, the past decade has seen a spurt in both production and academic research on cozy games, i.e., games that reject the game model based on competitiveness, time restrictiveness, and the scarcity of resources, instead promoting gameplay experiences that are casual, enjoyable, and calm. Although in the gaming literature, they have been given many names, depending on the aspects on which the analysis was focused – such as “ambient games” (Fizek 2018; Hjorth and Richardson 2020), “friendship games” (Harrington 2018), or “personal games” (Parker 2013) — the term “cozy games” became a common term in the game industry and, thus, starts being more common in  (Cook 2018, Waszkiewicz and Bakun 2020).… read more. “Call: Cozy Games and Coziness in Digital Games for Replay. The Polish Journal of Game Studies”

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Gen Z dating app Snack lets your AI-trained avatar go on dates so you don’t have to

[The day when you regularly send a digital version of yourself to act as your agent in interactions with other people (and their own digital agents) may not be far off. This short story from Fast Company reports that the video dating app Snack now lets users send “AI-trained avatars of themselves … out into Snack’s virtual dating world to chat with other users” and “if [it] thinks there could be a match, it’ll report to you so you can decide for yourself and start a real human-to-human conversation.” A bit ironic given that one of the app’s tag lines is “Show the Real You.” Slate has a related, longer story titled “My Epic, Embarrassing, Shockingly Successful Ploy to Get My Friend a Date Using A.I.: What happens on Tinder and Bumble when your wingman is ChatGPT.” –Matthew]

Gen Z dating app Snack lets your AI-trained avatar go on dates so you don’t have to

We live in the future now and this is a thing that’s happening.read more. “Gen Z dating app Snack lets your AI-trained avatar go on dates so you don’t have to”

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Call: ICTS4eHealth 2023 – IEEE International Workshop on ICT Solutions for e-Health

Call for Papers

ICTS4eHealth 2023
3rd Edition of IEEE International Conference on ICT Solutions for e-Health
In conjunction with the 28th IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC)
Tunis, Tunisia
July 9-12, 2023
https://icts4ehealth.icar.cnr.it

Submission deadline: April 16, 2023

MISSION:

E-Health is one of the major research topics that have been attracting cross-disciplinary research groups. The deployment of new emerging ICT technologies for Health, especially based on Cloud computing, Internet of Things (IoT), and Computational Intelligence, is attracting the interest of many researchers. Following the success of five workshop editions and two years as an International IEEE Conference, we are now proud to announce the third edition of this popular event dedicated to ICT solutions for e-Health. The conference will bring together researchers from academia, industry, government, and medical centers in order to present the state of the art in the emerging area of the use of cloud systems in connected health infrastructure and applications, and the use of IoT and Computational Intelligence techniques in the area of e-Health.… read more. “Call: ICTS4eHealth 2023 – IEEE International Workshop on ICT Solutions for e-Health”

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UCHealth augmented reality app brings digital dogs to life to boost patient well-being

[The Colorado-based UCHealth system has added a social presence-evoking augmented reality feature to its mobile app that allows patients (and others) to interact with virtual dogs wherever they have their smartphone or other device. Details are in the story below from UCHealth Today, where the original includes a second picture. A December 2022 Healthcare IT News story notes the connection with presence:

“In August [2022], [Nicole]Caputo [UCHealth senior director of Experience and Innovation] told Healthcare IT News that UCHealth plans to keep building AR experiences, in both iOS and Android, that educate patients and improve overall connectivity with their health. ‘The technology has come a long way in the past few years,’ she said.

Virtual reality and AR experiences that are built on the foundations of empirically supported therapies may provide an ideal companion to some in-person mental health therapies, according to Risa Weisberg, chief clinical officer at mental health technology vendor BehaVR.… read more. “UCHealth augmented reality app brings digital dogs to life to boost patient well-being”

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