[As this first-person report on the new VR mode in Microsoft Flight Simulator makes clear, there are many early-day bugs to overcome, but the experience evokes a strong sense of spatial presence and presence as realism. See the original Engadget story for three more images and a 4:51 minute video. A 6:52 minute video review by a professional pilot is available on YouTube, along with the same pilot’s sparsely narrated 23 minute video of a bush flight and flights around New York and San Francisco. –Matthew] Microsoft Flight Simulator’s new VR mode haunts my dreams When virtual reality meets dream…

[The theory that our entire existence is an advanced simulation is going viral on TikTok, as reported in this link-filled short story from Futurism. The December 22 Your Tango roundup it mentions has more examples and notes that “The simulation theory hashtag on TikTok already has 27.4 million views and the simulation hashtag has 624.4 million views — that means it’s gaining a ton of traction on TikTok.“ The September 2020 Bustle story “#GlitchTok Viral TikTok Videos Are The Best Way To Creep Yourself Out” says “There are thousands of videos to lose yourself in, and comment sections to theorize…

[As this story from The Ghost Howls blog explains, CrowsNest XR’s Anna is a multi-lingual, always-available digital concierge for hotels in China. While ‘she’ currently has to be triggered by a QR code and answers predetermined questions from a screen menu, the company and partner Amazon China have big plans to expand the service to evoke greater presence – she already can appear in augmented reality and will be able to interact conversationally and in other ways become more of a human companion for tourists and other guests. See the original story for three more images and three videos. –Matthew]…

[While technology-based presence experiences are usually designed to simulate ‘normal’ non-mediated human experiences of the world, they can become even more intuitive and direct, as with brain control interfaces. This story from Engadget explains the potential in reviewing a new developer kit for the NextMind BCI. For a similarly positive assessment see coverage in TechCrunch, which includes this:] “NextMind’s system is elegantly simple in conception, which is probably why it feels so powerful and rich in use. After the calibration process, I immediately jumped into the demos and was performing a range of actions effectively with my brain. First was…

[In this engaging first person story from Newsweek, the CEO of the Utherverse 3D virtual reality social network provides insights into the platform’s origins, evolution, and design philosophy and the experiences of users that mimic those in the physical world. See the original story for three more images and a 15 minute video. –Matthew] ‘I Run a Virtual Reality Dating Network Where You Can Have Sex and Marry’ Brian Shuster, CEO of Utherverse December 13, 2020 Before I was creating avatar real world representations, I was a key innovator for the very early internet in the 90s. Around that time,…

[The prospect of extremely realistic, presence-evoking masks that can make one person appear to be another is entertaining in the Mission: Impossible franchise (see a Variety story and CinemaBlend video compilation), but it raises all kinds of practical and ethical issues. The story below from Vice features an interview with the head of a Japanese company “buying faces” of members of the public to reproduce them in mask form in what it calls the “That Face” project. The original story features seven different pictures and a 28 second video also available via YouTube (for some reason the story introduction overlooks…