International Society
for Presence Research

Author: Matthew Lombard

  • Call: Powering the Metaverse: The Hardware Platforms – Free online LA SIGGRAPH event

    Published:

    Call for Participation LA ACM SIGGRAPH Presents… Visions of the Metaverse 2022: Powering the Metaverse: The Hardware Platforms Date: Tuesday, 12 April 2022 Time: 7 – 9pm PDT Location: Zoom Virtual Event https://lasiggraph.org/event/powering-metaverse-hardware-platforms DESCRIPTION: Join Host/Moderator Larry Rosenthal, Vice Chair of LA Siggraph, as they welcome Industry Leaders from the Companies that are creating, building, and selling the tools for the Metaverse.  April’s webinar will focus on the Hardware systems, and May’s webinar will focus on the Software and tool Platforms. Both Webinars will be presented via Zoom and have a Live VR Meet-and-Greet afterwards online in the LA SIGGRAPH…

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  • Using chemical haptics to enhance presence in virtual reality

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    [New coverage from SyFy and New Scientist (the latter behind a paywall) describes an interesting approach to adding the sense of touch (and presence) to experiences in virtual reality; the New Scientist story begins with this: “You open a door and it hits you – a flare of warmth on your skin. You brace yourself to go inside, battling smoke and heat. Flames flicker around you as you make your way through a burning building. You find what you came for and escape. Outside, it is so cold you start to shiver, while your hands and feet go numb. But…

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  • Call: Minds and Machines issue: Computing Cultures: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives

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    Call for Papers for Minds and Machines Special Issue on Computing Cultures: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives Following the 6th History and Philosophy of Computing Conference (HaPoC) Conference https://www.springer.com/journal/11023/updates/18800754 Guest Editors: Juan Luis Gastaldi (ETH Zurich) and Luc Pellissier (Université de Paris-Est Créteil) Submission deadline: June 28th, 2022 Digital machines of the 20th century were inspired by the biological individual, replacing the cultural and social image of machines from the 19th century with a solipsistic mental one. However, the growing cultural import of computing practices has become ever more pressing with the spectacular deployment of computers in all the dimensions of…

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  • SONICOM: Developing a practical way to create personalized immersive audio for VR/AR

    Published:

    [Imperial College London researchers are part of a consortium developing new “technologies and techniques” to create personalized audio experiences that are immersive and mimic our nonmediated experiences. This story from the University is a first-person report about one part of the project; see the original version for two more pictures and a 20 second audio demonstration. A February 2021 story from the University includes this: “Imperial College London researchers have won a €5.7million EU Horizon 2020 grant to develop AI-informed immersive audio techniques. The project, called SONICOM, will see researchers develop immersive 3D sound for virtual and alternative reality situations…

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  • Call: 12th International Workshop on Human Behavior Understanding (HBU)

    Published:

    CALL FOR PAPERS – HBU 2022 12th International Workshop on Human Behavior Understanding (HBU) Focus theme: Applications for Clinical and Behavioral Sciences Held in conjunction with ICPR 2022, the 26th International Conference on Pattern Recognition August 21-25, 2022 Montréal Québec Workshop: https://www.cmpe.boun.edu.tr/hbu/2022/ ICPR 2022: https://www.icpr2022.com/ Paper submission deadline: May 3rd, 2022 Notifications: June 1st, 2022 Camera-ready submission deadline: June 24th, 2022 Workshop: August 21st/25th, 2022 (to be confirmed) ABOUT Domains for human behavior understanding (e.g. multimedia, human-computer interaction, robotics, affective computing and social signal processing) predominantly rely on advanced pattern recognition techniques to automatically interpret complex behavioral patterns generated when…

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  • “The Soloist VR”: Interview with creators of new free-solo climbing VR experience

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    [Without using the term, this Climbing interview with the creators of a new virtual reality film of free solo rock climbing describes how they addressed some of the many challenges in creating an effective presence experience (and how watching their own film still creates that experience for them). I’ve removed some of the conversation not related to presence. For more information, pictures and video excerpts, follow the links in the story. –Matthew] Interview: Alex Honnold and Jonathan Griffith on Free Soloing & Virtual Reality “The Soloist VR” is a two-part series (available on Oculus TV) that chronicles Alex Honnold’s free…

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  • Call: Presence and Communication – Special issue of Review of Communication

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    Call for Papers Presence and Communication Special issue of Review of Communication https://bit.ly/Presence_Communication Special Issue Editor: Stephanie Kelly, North Carolina A&T State University, sekelly@ncat.edu Manuscript submission deadline: 01 October 2022 Presence variables play a role in any communication context. In an early discussion of presence technologies such as virtual reality, 3-D films, television, and telephones, Lombard and Ditton (1997) explained that what these types of technologies have in common is that they are, “designed to give the user a type of mediated experience that has never been possible before: one that seems truly ‘natural,’ ‘immediate,’ ‘direct,’ and ‘real,’ a mediated experience…

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  • Needy, overconfident voice assistants are wearing on their owners’ last nerves

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    [This Washington Post story highlights important limitations in current voice assistants that lead to frustrating interactions, though arguably more negative rather than fewer medium-as-social-actor presence experiences. See the last two paragraphs for an interesting theory about what’s happening. For a more optimistic perspective on these technologies and how social cues can be used to improve their effects, see the January 2022 MIT News story “’Hey, Alexa! Are you trustworthy?’: The more social behaviors a voice-user interface exhibits, the more likely people are to trust it, engage with it, and consider it to be competent.” –Matthew] [Image: Credit: Washington Post illustration/iStock]…

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  • Call: Revisiting Patient-Clinician Interaction in 2022 – ECSCW 2022 Workshop

    Published:

    Call for Papers Revisiting Patient-Clinician Interaction in 2022: Challenges from the Field and Opportunities for Future Research Workshop held in conjunction with ECSCW 2022, The 20th European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work Coimbra, Portugal June 28th, 2022 https://bit.ly/RevisitingPatientClinicianInteraction Submission deadline: April 15th, 2022 The goal of this workshop is to revisit the concept of patient-clinician interaction, a classical concept of CSCW research in healthcare. While the CSCW community has been working on patient-clinician interaction for decades, the last years have seen a number of changes to care provision, motivated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the strong uptake of remote care technologies,…

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  • Presence-evoking tech unlocks historic North Jersey mansion for people with disabilities

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    [We need more, and more institutional support and funding for, projects like the one described in this story from NorthJersey.com about the application of presence-evoking technologies to provide more access to historic (and many other) sites. See the original story and coverage from the County College of Morris for more pictures and details. –Matthew] [Image: CCM Associate Professor Hrvoje Slovec photographing The Willows] Virtual reality unlocks historic North Jersey mansion for people with disabilities By Gene Myers, NorthJersey.com March 14, 2022 There’s a lot of history to see at The Willows, the 1854 Gothic revival mansion in Morris County –…

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  • Call: Meaningful Play 2022

    Published:

    Call for Submissions International Conference on Meaningful Play 2022 October 12-14, 2022 East Lansing, Michigan, USA https://meaningfulplay.msu.edu/ https://meaningfulplay.msu.edu/submissions.php Deadline for all submissions: June 14, 2022 Whether designed to entertain or to achieve more “serious” purposes, games, virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality have the potential to impact players’ beliefs, knowledge, attitudes, emotions, cognitive abilities, physical and mental health, and behavior. Meaningful Play 2022 is a conference about theory, research, and game design innovations, principles and practices. Meaningful Play brings scholars and industry professionals together to understand and improve upon games to entertain, inform, educate, and persuade in meaningful ways.…

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  • 3D “holoportation” for the masses

    Published:

    [The pandemic has enhanced several efforts to market a holographic communication system. The bullet-pointed story below from Axios reports on a new smaller version of the PORTL holographic system (see a September 2020 ISPR Presence News post about the original vending-machine size product). For more details about the new mini hologram unit see the press release via Global Newswire (which notes that the company and product are changing names to Proto). Mashable covers Proto and a competitor and notes that: “Photos and even videos of these 2D holograms (they may look 3D, but the images are still projected onto a…

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