[The author of this story from Wired provides a vivid and personal description of the experience provided by “Body of Mine,” a new project that uses virtual reality and presence to increase empathy with and support for people with gender dysphoria. See the project’s website for more information, including this from the “Vision” section: “LGBTQ+VR With the rise in attacks against transgender individuals and their rights, we believe that full immersion has the potential for not only powerful empathetic responses from non-queer people, but also profound support for those who are closeted or questioning. While a young trans girl in…

[The presence illusions we studied used to be simpler: Are you in the actual world or one created by virtual reality (or film, television, etc.)? Does that desktop computer seem to be just a technology or a social actor? Over the last few decades, the ways in which we misperceive the roles of technology in an experience have multiplied. With augmented, mixed and extended reality; telepresence robots; multi-platform virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa; smartphones; advances in CGI and VFX; audio and visual deepfakes; a wide variety of robots including Sophia and Ameca; digital humans; holograms; and now generative and…

[Non-player characters in games provide important information that brings the human player into the game setting and story. As Business Insider notes, “One video game alone can have dozens — if not hundreds — of non-player characters, or NPCs. Controlled by a computer, these characters range from Tom Nook, who runs the village store in ‘Animal Crossing,’ to Zelda, the princess of Hyrule and namesake of the Nintendo series. Over the past few decades, the graphics and basic dialogue of these characters may have advanced, but the interactions can still feel static and scripted.” To make interactions with NPCs more…

[A multi-campus, cross-disciplinary, NSF-funded project is designed to make it easier for researchers to conduct studies of extended reality (XR) experiences and impacts using larger and more diverse sets of participants, as reported in this story from the University of Central Florida. See also a related press release from Lehigh University via Eurekalert! that links to a story about Lehigh Professor Valerie Jones Taylor’s “own research focused on the potential of VR to improve encounters between members of different races.” –Matthew] UCF Leads Development of First Large-scale System for Extended Reality Research The nearly $5 million project will facilitate human…

[In this essay for TechCrunch, virtual reality expert Jeremy Beilenson argues that virtual reality and other immersive media experiences are dangerously engaging and distracting and therefore do not belong in automobiles. –Matthew] [Image: Credit: 5m3photos / Getty Images] The other DWI: Driving while immersed VR headsets have no place in moving automobiles By Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab and author of “Experience on Demand: What Virtual Reality Is, How It Works, and What It Can Do.” May 23, 2023 On May 17, Meta and BMW released a video hailing a joint research breakthrough that will allow…

[Much of the coverage of the increasingly widespread use of artificial intelligence to generate music is about the complex legal and ethical issues involved (e.g., see Holland & Knight and Rolling Stone). But as the story below from Interesting Engineering notes, the fact that this music is generated by AI is “often not discernible to a follower or a fan,” which represents an important form of presence (a misperception of the role of technology in a mediated experience). An earlier story from Interesting Engineering titled “Scammer sells AI-generated Frank Ocean’s songs, makes thousands of dollars,” begins with this: “We’ve definitely…