[This story from The Register provides a nice overview of the many efforts to incorporate haptic sensation in virtual reality (and thereby increase presence for users); the original story includes videos for four of the technologies. –Matthew] We won’t need to go outside if these haptic tricksters have their way Simulating physical sensations is a growing frontier in VR tech By David Matthews 26 Jan 2018 Haptic controllers are being touted as the next frontier in virtual reality. Having spent years obsessing over headset pixel counts, the VR industry is now playing with exoskeletal gloves, ultrasound waves and even electric…

[Now you can replace your telepresence robot with a human surrogate wearing the ChameleonMask! This story is from Mental Floss, where the original includes a 30 second video; much more information is available from the project website. –Matthew] ‘Human Uber’ Lets a Surrogate Socialize For You By Jay Serafino February 1, 2018 Has the process of interacting with other human beings become too much for you, but you don’t have the heart to ditch your social obligations completely? Then you’ll be very interested in what virtual reality researcher Jun Rekimoto showed off at MIT Tech Review’s EmTech conference in Asia…

[This is an interesting story from IFLScience about medium-as-social-actor presence in a Scotland grocery store. Our colleague David Benyon from Napier University is quoted in coverage from the Sunday Herald and a cultural explanation for how people responded to Fabio the robot is included (along with a short video) in a story in ZDNet. –Matthew] Store Hires Robot To Help Out Customers, Robot Gets Fired For Scaring Customers Away By James Felton 22 January 2018 Every few months there’s a story warning us that robots will take over our jobs within five, 10, or 20 years. You don’t get a lot…

[As this story from Futurism does, all or nearly all the press coverage of this technology advance with implications for presence begin by referring to science fiction portrayals (e.g., in Star Wars, Iron Man, and Avatar). The original Futurism story includes links to coverage in Nature News, the Nature article and the BYU press release as well as a 2:24 minute BYU video. –Matthew] [Image: One of Smalley’s students, wearing a lab coat and posed like Princess Leia. Image Credit: Smalley et al., Nature] Physicists Just Made Star Wars-Style 3D Projections a Reality By Dom Galeon January 26, 2018 IN…

[The new Space 360 spherical theater in Gwangju, South Korea (about 3 hours by train south of Seoul) is designed to evoke a strong sense of spatial presence. The original version of this story from urdesignmag includes 7 more images and a 3 minute video; more information is available from the Front Pictures blog, including this from the (admittedly biased) sponsor: “The feedback from the audience is great. They say that they have never experienced anything like this before. And they feel like they have travelled into another dimension!” –Matthew] Inside South Korea’s First Spherical Projection Theater The Gwangju National…

[This short piece from Open Culture is about how experts were fooled into thinking that music composed by artificial intelligence in the style of Bach was composed by Bach himself (i.e., they experienced presence, misperceiving the role of technology in the experience). The story references a more detailed article on the project from December 2016 and comes as “Hello World, the first album composed with AI,” is being released. For an interesting discussion of the implications of all of this, see a September 2017 article in Playboy titled “Will Artificial Intelligence Elevate Pop Music or Pervert It? (The Answer is…