[While it may provide important benefits, especially given age-related demographic trends, the prospect of utilizing presence-evoking technologies to supplement or even replace human beings who provide health care to the elderly raises concerns about dystopian outcomes. The author of the important story below from a 404 Media email newsletter reports on his test of a new service that uses audio AI to check in on and converse with elderly family members each day and then provides a report on the interaction to the service subscriber. See the original version of the story for two more images and audio recordings of…

[As this story from Mixed notes, “without tactile feedback, typing in VR feels unnatural and inefficient,” but a new input device could make using one technology (a computer) within another (VR) evoke greater presence (I guess that could be called nested presence). See the original version of the story for a different image and the 1:02 minute demonstration video (also on YouTube), and see Github for more information. –Matthew] [Image: Source: GitHub] DIY haptic controller brings touch typing to Virtual Reality A creative developer has built a wearable eight-key controller that could solve one of VR’s most persistent challenges: text…

[The story below from Carnegie-Mellon University’s Center for Transformational Play describes a doctoral student’s creative and research work in a project that uses a presence-evoking virtual reality experience to help people feel connected to the deepest parts of the ocean; see the original version of the story for three different images and a video trailer. –Matthew] [Image: Screenshot from “Echo of the Abyss” trailer] Using Virtual Reality to Connect Players With Ocean Ecosystems By: Maila Jill RibleApril 2, 2025 Fewer people have been to the deepest parts of the ocean than have walked on the surface of the moon. Researchers…

[A mixed reality game developed at the University of Maryland helps players learn about the consequences of different behaviors during a thunderstorm, and hopefully stay safe when they encounter dangerous storm conditions in the real world. Follow the links in the story below for more information. –Matthew] [Image: A car protects a cartoon owl from a lightning strike in a mixed-reality game designed to teach lightning safety that was designed by a UMD researcher and created with help from a student team. Credit: Image courtesy of Guangyang Fang] Game Keeps Players ‘Virtually’ Safe From Lightning VR Headset Provides Immersive Learning…

[If presence involves the failure to overlook the role of technology in a mediated experience, artificial intelligence clearly represents a new source of presence misperceptions. This is the second of two posts today about the purposeful misrepresentation of materials produced by AI as if they were created by human beings, and the likelihood that soon all of us will have great difficulty distinguishing human-made and machine-made media content. The story below is from EL PAÍS and describes a recent significant misrepresentation of AI as human in scholarly publication venues. –Matthew] [Image: Andrea Colamedici, the creator of Jianwei Xun, pictured in…

[If presence involves the failure to overlook the role of technology in a mediated experience, artificial intelligence clearly represents a new source of presence misperceptions. This is the first of two posts today about the purposeful misrepresentation of materials produced by AI as if they were created by human beings, and the likelihood that soon all of us will have great difficulty distinguishing human-made and machine-made media content. The story below is from the UK’s Press Gazette, where the original version includes two additional images. While some of the publications in which AI-generated authors and experts have been featured might…

[Warning: This article from The Times may disturb some readers. It’s about a program that uses spatial and social presence to help convicted, imprisoned domestic abusers in Spain understand what it’s like to be the victim rather than the perpetrator of that crime. See the original story for two more images; related coverage of crime and justice is also available from The Times. For more details about the VRespectMe program, see the April 2023 report “Use of Virtual Reality in Catalan Prisons: Challenges and Opportunities” from Justice Trends. –Matthew] [Image: The psychologist Nicolas Barnes, right, showcases the technology in Catalonia,…

[This thought-provoking essay from Psychology Today published late last year explores some larger implications of the increasingly compelling medium-as-social-actor presence illusions evoked by using sophisticated artificial intelligence technology. –Matthew] [Image: Art generated by DALL-E/OpenAI] The Rabbit Hole Without a Hole: The Illusion of AI Personal Perspective: Our quest for AI’s soul is an archaeology of imagination. By John Nosta, an innovation theorist and founder of NostaLab.Reviewed by Monica Vilhauer Ph.D.December 9, 2024 For as long as we’ve existed, we’ve crafted illusions to stretch the boundaries of what we know. From the myths of Prometheus and golems to the mechanical marvel…

[To publicize and increase interest in their Lab and research, and to help students and others become more comfortable with presence-evoking technologies, two researchers at the Virtual/Augmented Reality Lab at the Penn State Behrend campus in Erie, Pennsylvania will attempt to set a Guinness World Record by “watching 55 hours of uninterrupted content in VR headsets.” The press release is below; more information (including about how to watch the attempt online) is available at the Lab’s website. –Matthew] [Image: Lauren Cass, the immersive administrator at Penn State Behrend’s Virtual/Augmented Reality Lab, will attempt to set a Guinness World Record by…

[The InterRecon technology described in this New Atlas story has intriguing potential to enhance a wide variety of presence experiences. See the original version of the story for three more images and the mentioned video. –Matthew] [Image: MIT’s InteRecon tech recreates physical objects in mixed reality, complete with the way they function. Credit: Images provided by the research team] MIT tech recreates old toys as interactive playthings in mixed reality By Abhimanyu GhoshalApril 2, 2025 A team of researchers from MIT, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and ETH Zurich, has developed a mind-blowing tool to not only…

[Venezuelans in Dural, Florida and around the world are visiting their homeland by viewing a 360 degree high-definition video in virtual reality, as reported in this story from WLRN Public Media. Note especially the first-person reporting at the end by the author herself. The original story includes an audio version, a second image, a nine-image photo gallery from Instagram, and the 10:24 minute video from YouTube. (Personal note: I wish I could discuss this story and project with my former student, colleague and friend Gisela Gil-Egui and her husband Jose Labrador.) –Matthew] [Image: Friends at the “Teleport to Venezuela” event…

[Dartmouth University researchers have published a systematic clinical study of the effectiveness of an AI-powered therapist called Therabot, which they trained using “original training set the researchers developed from current, evidence-based best practices for psychotherapy and cognitive behavioral therapy.” The impressive reductions in reported symptoms of depression, anxiety and concerns about body image and weight come with some important caveats, but a key result concerns medium-as-social-actor presence: Senior author Nicholas Jacobson notes that “We did not expect that people would almost treat the software like a friend. It says to me that they were actually forming relationships with Therabot.” See…