[The profound implications of the innovation described in this story from the MIT Media Lab is clear in this sentence from the second-to-last paragraph: “We see a future in which our designed world will be carefully integrated within our nature: a world in which what is biological and what is not, what is human and what is not, what is nature and what is not, will be forever blurred.” See the original story for an additional image, three videos, an FAQ and more. Futurism’s coverage, titled “Artificial Limbs We Forget Are Artificial,” links to a story in Popular Mechanics with…

[Oculus Venues is a new platform for social VR and this story from Wired describes some of the key design choices its creators faced; it includes both explicit and indirect references to presence. The original version includes different images; for more information about what the Venues experience is like see stories in CNET and Mashable. –Matthew] [Image: Source: VRScout] With Venues, Oculus and Facebook Push Social VR Into New Territory Peter Rubin May 30, 2018 Tonight, more than 9,000 people will fill Red Rocks Amphitheatre outside Denver to listen to Vance Joy, an Australian singer-songwriter with a name like a…

[This new telepresence robot has capabilities that make it more like a “real life” avatar for users. The short story is from SoraNews24, where it includes a different image and a 1:45 minute video. For more information see a story in Forbes that considers the robot’s potential use for remote shopping, and a press release via Digital Journal. –Matthew] Japanese telecom company unveils robot that lets you see, hear, and feel through it [Video] The only problem is that it looks like a killing machine compared to domestic robot Pepper. Koh Ruide June 4, 2018 When Japanese telecommunications company Softbank…

[This story examines a recent study of the potential of a film that provides both male and female perspectives in an unusual split-sphere 360° video format to create empathy and attitude change. The story is from Medium, where the original includes three different images. It’s worth looking at the study itself (via Dropbox), in which presence and other aspects of the technology and experience are considered. A related recent story worth a look is “Walking in another’s virtual shoes: Do 360-degree video news stories generate empathy in viewers?“ in Columbia Journalism Review. –Matthew] [Image: Source: UTURN creator Nathalie Mathe] The…

[This story from MIT News describes what sounds like a valuable course at MIT, one that explicitly covers presence. My colleague Laura Zaylea and I have been doing something similar in a cross-course collaboration (Emerging Media Production and Psychological Processing of Media), initially focusing on 360 videos and augmented reality. If you teach or know of other courses like this, please let me know (at lombard@temple.edu). –Matthew] [Image: In MIT’s hands-on humanities class CMS.339 (Virtual Reality and Immersive Media Production), students are grappling with multiple dimensions of making virtual reality, from technical challenges, to philosophical questions, to the art of…

[This story from Inverse describes a clever new way to manipulate VR users’ perceptions to create more natural walking (and thus presence) experiences in virtual worlds. –Matthew] [Image: Source: Digital Trends] VR Worlds Where You Can Actually Walk Around Are on the Way Goodbye, room-limited HTC Vive games! By Mike Brown May 30, 2018 Ready to go on an infinite journey through virtual reality? Researchers at Stony Brook University, working with Nvidia and Adobe, announced on Tuesday that they’ve taken a big step toward making virtual worlds feel vast and expansive. By manipulating the eye’s natural movements, the researchers say…