[Although it doesn’t uses the terminology of presence, this essay from Inside Higher Ed is all about the evolution of technologies designed to evoke medium-as-social-actor presence and how they can be applied in the context of higher education.  –Matthew] [Image: Cecilia Santiago-González, left, assistant vice president for strategic initiatives for student success, left, and communications specialist Zoe Lance are managers of Billy Chat, an artificial intelligence text messaging bot for students at Cal Poly Pomona. Source: “Artificial intelligence meets real friendship: College students are bonding with robots,” Los Angeles Times. Credit: Irfan Khan] Our New Digital Colleagues and Friends By…

[The new augmented reality app CrimeDoor features augmented reality recreations of crime scenes, as reported in this Yahoo! story. A pre-Easter press release from the company via PR Newswire highlights the recreation of the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ (and includes a video demonstration): “With billions of people around the world familiar with the story of Jesus’ crucifixion, AR allows app users to finally experience the moment that shaped history, directly in their own space. The innovation of Augmented Reality places the 3D scene in a user’s room, so they can physically walk into the space with a mobile device and…

[While we’re dealing with the difficult day-to-day realities of the pandemic it’s easy to overlook the speed, magnitude and significance of what will be lasting changes in how we live, many of which involve increases in presence. This essay from Chief Executive by the CEO of a technology company captures some of that big picture and what to expect as the world slowly recovers; as the author’s last line notes, “It’s a strange, but exciting, new (virtual) world.”  –Matthew] Three Lessons CEOs Can Learn From The Boom Of Virtual Experiences Our world likely will remain in a hybrid model well…

[This Meidum OneZero interview with author Kate Darling explores several interesting implications of medium-as-social-actor presence evoked by human-like robots, including insights from the history of our views about interacting with animals. –Matthew] How We Treat Animals Will Inform Our Future With Robots Evan Selinger in conversation with Kate Darling from MIT Media Lab By Evan Selinger April 1, 2021 [This is Open Dialogue, an interview series from OneZero about technology and ethics.] A few years ago, I read a fascinating paper by Kate Darling, a research specialist at the MIT Media Lab, that left a lasting impression. In “Extending Legal…

[It sounds counter-intuitive to have humans make the trip to Mars and not land there, but this story from Aerotech News lays out the convincing arguments for using low-latency telepresence to explore that planet and other space destinations; see the original version of the story for two more pictures. –Matthew] [Image: An artists’ impression of a spacecraft over Deimos. Credit: Lockheed Martin] Exploring the solar system through low-latency telepresence By Peter W. Merlin, special to Aerotech News March 18, 2021 Ever since the Apollo astronauts left their footprints on the lunar surface, humans have focused on Mars as the next…

[This story from The Next Web uses new memory research and vivid hypotheticals to explore the potential psychological manipulations enabled by deepfake videos. –Matthew] How Deepfakes could help implant false memories in our minds It’s startlingly easy By Tristan Greene March 31, 2021 The human brain is a complex, miraculous thing. As best we can tell, it’s the epitome of biological evolution. But it doesn’t come with any security software preinstalled. And that makes it ridiculously easy to hack. We like to imagine the human brain as a giant neural network that speaks its own language. When we talk about…