Author: Matthew Lombard


  • Call: 21st century photography: Art, philosophy, technique

    CALL FOR PAPERS 21st century photography: art, philosophy, technique Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London 5-6 June 2015 Abstracts due March 10, 2015 This trans-disciplinary conference aims to explore a series of themes that emerge from the understanding of contemporary photography as the basic unit of visual communication of the age of technology: online, off-line and between the lines. The aim is to bridge the gap between aesthetic, philosophical and technological approaches to the photographic image and to prompt participants from different backgrounds (fine art, critical theory, philosophy, software/hardware) to engage with each other and to open new…

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  • Valley of the Dolls: Nagora, Japan’s departed residents are ‘replaced’ by scarecrow replicas

    [Another unusual context for social presence… this is from All Day, where there are 21 more images and the link below to a 6:30 minute documentary on Vimeo. I particularly like that you can ‘visit’ the town and its dolls via Google Earth. For a more unsettling example of this kind of thing, there’s Mexico’s Isla de las Munecas (Island of the Dolls) – see isladelasmunecas.com and the 2:34 minute video by David Maurice Smith on Vimeo. –Matthew ] Nagora, Japan: Valley Of The Dolls By Ash M. Richter If all of your neighbors were replaced by dolls, what would…

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  • Call: Cognitive Models and Emotions Detection for Ambient Intelligence (COMEDAI 2015)

    CALL FOR PAPERS Cognitive Models and Emotions Detection for Ambient Intelligence (COMEDAI 2015) Special Session of the 9th International Symposium on Intelligent Distributed Computing (http://islab.di.uminho.pt/idc2015/) 7th-9th October 2015, Guimarães, Portugal http://islab.di.uminho.pt/comedai2015/ The detection and recognition of human emotions and social signals is a key issue in the development of socially intelligent systems. This interdisciplinary field has been lastly provided some applications including marketing, autism therapy for children and at-home medical care and assistance. Given the tendency of the worldwide society, the step further would be to design Ambient Intelligence systems able to take care of elderly and disabled people. That…

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  • Dolby dives into virtual reality with Atmos surround sound for VR

    [This story from The Verge includes some interesting impressions comparing standard and Dolby Atmos audio for different VR content; only a step forward, but it’s (exciting) early days. –Matthew ] Dolby dives into virtual reality with Atmos surround sound for VR By Bryan Bishop on February 26, 2015 As the momentum behind virtual reality slowly continues to build we’re seeing more traditional movie companies dip their toes into the medium. Today Dolby is announcing a partnership with Jaunt that will bring its Atmos surround sound technology to the world of VR — and it may turn out that virtual reality…

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  • Call: UCDAS 2015 – 2nd IEEE Workshop on User-Centered Design and Adaptive Systems

    Call For Papers IEEE COMPSAC 2015: UCDAS: 2nd Workshop on User-Centered Design and Adaptive Systems Taichung, Taiwan – July 1-5, 2015 Submission deadline: March 18, 2015 The 2nd IEEE International Workshop on User Centered Design and Adaptive Systems, UCDAS 2015, is co-located with COMPSAC 2015, http://www.computer.org/portal/web/COMPSAC/home. The aim of this Workshop is to introduce the combination of different disciplines to build adaptive systems. Also, to discuss this approach and the state-of-the-art advances in research and development of the construction of user-centered adaptive systems. This Workshop is addressed to researchers from different disciplines in academia and industry, as well as practitioners,…

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  • Using VR to alter experience of neck pain

    [I wonder how this will change physical rehabilitation in the future – manipulating perceptions of a person’s body movement can affect, and logically could be used to treat, their experience of pain; this is the press release from the University of South Australia. –Matthew ] Neck pain can be changed through altered visual feedback February 23 2015 Using virtual reality to misrepresent how far the neck is turned can actually change pain experiences in individuals who suffer from chronic neck pain, according to research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. It may seem like…

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  • Call: “I”Robot? Rethinking the I-You Relation through Dialogical Philosophy in the Ethics of AI and Robotics (AI & Society special issue)

    Call for Papers: Special Issue AI & Society http://link.springer.com/journal/volumesAndIssues/146 (2015) Editor (Kathleen Richardson) “I”Robot? Rethinking the I-You relation through dialogical philosophy in the Ethics of AI and Robotics ABSTRACTS accepted now – end of March This Special Issue: “I”Robot? Rethinking the I-You relation through dialogical philosophy in the Ethics of AI and Robotics will address issues in dialogical philosophy (Buber), concerning the nature of “I” and “You” and the relatedness between them (Buber, Stawarska, Bakhtin, Husserl, Derrida). AI robotic scientists develop embodied agents (robots) with a (potential) viewpoint to interact with humans. We will explore what kinds of “I” models…

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  • Japanese owners hold funerals for ‘dead’ robot dogs

    [This is a dramatic illustration of the power of the form of presence in which a medium itself is perceived as a social actor! The story is from The Japan Times, where it includes two more images. –Matthew ] [Image: An A-Fun employee put[s] the Sony’s pet robot AIBOs at an altar prior to hold[ing] the robots’ funeral at the Kofukuji Temple in Isumi, Chiba Prefecture. | AFP-JIJI] An afterlife for man’s best robot friend? AFP-JIJI Feb 25, 2015 Incense smoke wafts through the cold air of the centuries-old Buddhist temple as a priest chants a sutra, praying for the…

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  • Call: Games and Transgressive Aesthetics Workshop at DiGRA 2015

    Call for Abstracts: Games and Transgressive Aesthetics Workshop at DiGRA 2015 May 14th-17th at Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany Overview: Digital games have a reputation for including excessive violence, and violent content tends to be the focal point when games become the target for public criticism. However, as interacting with the gameworld through the use of simulated violence is a convention in many games; and while game violence certainly can be experienced as unsettling, it seldom leads the game to become ”unplayable” for players. Rather, it seems that the game context contributes to reduce the offensiveness of such content. Indeed, players…

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  • VR sexuality: Your fantasies may never be the same

    [This is a particularly thoughtful, big-picture story about presence and sexuality, from Wired. Note the connection between immersion in books and VR, the historical perspective, the role of popular culture portrayals, the critique of some technologies and predictions for their success, and especially the explicit (no pun intended) discussion of the role of presence in mediated intimacy. Matt Jones and I argued in an article in Human Technology (pdf) that presence scholars should pay more attention to this context for presence experiences. –Matthew ] [Image: When Ela Darling and her collaborators filmed some test footage for the Oculus Rift, what…

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  • Call: 1st Workshop on Distributed Adaptive Systems (at ICAC 2015)

    Call for Papers DAS @ ICAC 2015 1st Workshop on Distributed Adaptive Systems At ICAC 2015, the 12th IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing Grenoble, France, July 7 2015 Paper Submission April 13, 2015 Notification May 15, 2015 Camera Ready May 22, 2015 Workshops July 07, 2015 Workshop website: http://www.agentgroup.unimore.it/DAS2015/ Conference website: http://icac2015.imag.fr On the account of the recent advances in technology, computational systems have to be thought as ever growing distributed artificial environments in which requirements, constituent components and user needs dynamically change in unpredictable ways. Coping with such uncertainties represents an interesting challenge for the designer of these…

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  • Why Social Virtual Reality is worth celebrating

    [This article from Road to VR not only uses the term presence but highlights many presence dimensions or types. Note that the “55% of communication is nonverbal” claim is a misapplication of Mehrabian’s work (e.g., see the 3:29 minute CreativityWorks video “Busting the Mehrabian Myth” on YouTube). –Matthew ] Why Social Virtual Reality is Worth Celebrating February 21, 2015 This guest article comes from Chris Madsen who has been eagerly exploring the developing Social VR scene. Chris graduated from the University of Utah in psychology and has worked in the mental health field for almost 20 years. Throughout his career…

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