[Though he doesn’t use the term, the writer of this essay in The Verge describes how the nascent status of AI-based voices and images being added to social media platforms could lead to a dramatic increase in experiences of presence, especially medium-as-social-actor presence: “feeds that were once defined by the connections they enabled between human beings will have become something else: a partially synthetic social network.” –Matthew] [Image: Credit: Álvaro Bernis / The Verge] The synthetic social network is coming Between ChatGPT’s surprisingly human voice and Meta’s AI characters, our feeds may be about to change forever By Casey Newton,…

[Penn State News provides this report on the use of virtual reality in Criminal Justice and other courses at Pennsylvania State University’s Harrisburg campus. Among other observations it’s interesting that the report says that “employers are looking for experience with [VR] on résumés.” See the original story for a photo gallery containing nine more images and a 2:05 minute video (also available on YouTube). –Matthew] [Image: Credit: Sharon Siegfried / Penn State] Virtual reality enhances learning for Harrisburg criminal justice students October 3, 2023 MIDDLETOWN, Pa. — They didn’t leave their seats in the Olmsted Building classroom, but Penn State…

[Many writers are covering and/or commenting on a new technique that uses artificial intelligence to incorporate ‘hidden’ messages in images (with varying degrees of presence-evoking subtlety). The Motherboard story below has a more serious tone while the Laptop Mag story that follows it takes a lighter approach. For more examples of the technique see coverage in Bored Panda, and if you’re interested in creating images yourself, Michael Brig has a four-minute tutorial on YouTube. –Matthew] AI-Generated ‘Subliminal Messages’ Are Going Viral. Here’s What’s Really Going On They’re not going make you subconsciously crave McDonald’s, but they are pretty cool as…

[The first of a series of concerts by U2 yielded a series of very positive assessments of the new Las Vegas venue known as the Sphere. This review from CNN provides a particularly good description, and the original story includes three different pictures and a 2:10 video. Coverage from Deadline features more images and videos and notes that “Reviewers were beside themselves to come up with superlatives that could adequately convey the venue’s multimedia. They called the $2.3 billion Sphere a ‘stunning spectacle’ (USA Today), ‘mind blowing’ (The Verge), and ‘utterly astonishing’ (The Guardian), among other media kudos.”…

[As reported in this story from the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, UT Austin researchers have outfitted Meta virtual reality headsets with soft, noninvasive EEG sensors to enable measurement and assessment of brain activity as wearers interact with virtual environments and experience presence. See the original story for a second image, and for detailed information see the open access article in Soft Science. –Matthew] Modified Virtual Reality Tech Can Measure Brain Activity August 3, 2023 Researchers have modified a commercial virtual reality headset, giving it the ability to measure brain activity and examine how…

[Press coverage of a video demonstration of Meta’s latest avatar technology seems to be universally positive. In the video, podcaster and MIT researcher Lex Fridman interviews Mark Zuckerberg using the technology, as reported in the story below from Futurism. Fridman introduces the hour-long video in a post to his 3 million X (Twitter) followers this way: “This was one of the most incredible experiences of my life. It really felt like we were talking in-person, but we were miles apart. It’s hard to put into words how awesome this was for someone like me who values the intimacy of in-person…