[The Financial Times reports on new and earlier efforts to use presence-evoking technology to recreate the experience of busy trading floors; follow the link in the image description for a 3:42 minute video and see the story “Extended Reality offers financial services huge opportunities“ from Consultancy.uk for related information. –Matthew]

[Image: Citigroup’s augmented reality workstation, combining 3D holograms and real-time financial data. The bank developed the system four years ago but never implemented it. Credit: Citigroup video via YouTube.]

Traders set to don virtual reality headsets in their home offices

UBS looks at recreating busy trading floors with London VR experiment for homeworkers

Owen Walker, European Banking Correspondent
September 18, 2020

Spare bedrooms and living rooms could soon become part of vibrant trading floors as one of the world’s biggest investment banks considers providing staff with augmented reality headsets.… read more. “Using MS HoloLenses to recreate busy trading floors at home during and after pandemic”

[The 1:08 minute video included with this press release from Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology via EurekAlert! (and also available on YouTube) isn’t very impressive on its own but it represents an important advance in presence-evoking technology. Optics.org provides a bit more technical information, including this:

“[N]one [of the previous approaches] have produced a satisfactory balance between the pixel period, the image intensity, and the achievable frame rate. … [N]one of these methods [to use reconfigurable metasurfaces] has successfully achieved metasurface hologram movies of more than 4 frames per second, according to the TUAT project.”

“TUAT took a public domain animation of the Earth and broke it down into 48 frames. Each frame was then fabricated onto a metasurface built up of rectangular ‘metallic aperture meta-atoms’ of gold, each measuring 200 x 100 x 120 nanometers. Each metasurface frame is capable of diffracting laser light shone through it so as to reproduce a holographic 3D image of that frame.… read more. “Researchers create a true holographic movie”

[The pandemic has increased the potential value of telepresence robots for tourism, with new robots and revenue models on the way. This story is from Skift, where the original includes two more images and a one minute video. –Matthew]

Robots Came For Your Jobs, Now They’re Coming for Your Vacations: Here’s How

Sean O’Neill, Skift
August 28, 2020

SKIFT TAKE:
Are there really enough people who want to remote-control a robot and visit places virtually? We’re skeptical. But the founder of the startup Propelmee is surprisingly persuasive at the potential uses for such robots.
— Sean O’Neill

The robots were already coming for your jobs. Now they’re coming for your vacations, too. Robot maker Propelmee will begin testing in mid-September at several UK attractions a virtual tourism robot called Challau.

People anywhere in the world can remotely control the robot, which looks like a Segway, via a simple, browser-based interface on their computer or smartphone.… read more. “Telepresence robots provide virtual tourism experiences during pandemic and beyond”

[Posts here in April and July highlighted the use of cardboard cutouts to provide a sense of the physical presence of people who can’t attend events because of the pandemic. The trend is continuing and expanding, including in my hometown, as reported in this story from The Philadelphia Inquirer (where the original version includes three more pictures). Any web search will reveal many more examples, but here are four that show the breadth of the phenomenon:

• How Jesús Luzardo connected with family of victim of Florida school shooting through cardboard cutout (Daily Democrat)
• Conan O’Brien will turn you into a cardboard cutout for his audience (Last Night On)
• Long Island synagogue inspired by NY Mets, gets cardboard cutouts of congregation for Rosh Hashanah (PIX 11)
• Jimmy Kimmel presents Emmys monologue to a full but fake audience (Los Angeles Times)

–Matthew]

The 2020 Phillies’ biggest hit might just be those cardboard cutouts in the stands

By Frank Fitzpatrick
September 19, 2020

They are undersize, immobile, and, for the most part, inexperienced, but when this strange 2020 baseball season has concluded, they likely will be remembered as some of the best role players in Phillies history.… read more. “Cardboard cutouts suggest audience presence in sports and beyond”

[There were several presence-related announcements at this week’s Facebook Connect conference and this story from The Verge touches on them, but it’s particularly interesting because it focuses on how CEO Mark Zuckerberg views the future, including this:

“The thing that excites me about virtual and augmented reality is the feeling of presence. The idea that this is the first computing platform in the history of computing, where you really feel like you’re there with another person. Right? Delivering a sense of presence is the thing that I care about. And VR and AR are going to be the technologies that do that.”

For related ‘big picture’ coverage see “Facebook virtual reality guru ’embarrassed’ by lack of social experiences for users during global pandemic” in Newsweek and “Facebook’s virtual reality push is about data, not gaming” in The Conversation. –Matthew]

[Image: Credit: Nick Statt / The Verge]

Mark Zuckerberg on why he doesn’t want to ‘put an Apple Watch on your face’

How Facebook’s CEO is thinking about the future of augmented reality, virtual reality, and more

By Casey Newton
September 16, 2020

Social networks contain multitudes.… read more. “How Facebook’s CEO is thinking about the future of AR, VR, and more”