[Here’s an interesting, and toward the end a bit philosophical, first-person report about the experience of using a virtual reality fitness program. It’s from The Cut’s Hot Bod, “a weekly exploration of fitness culture and its adjacent oddities.” Follow the first two links for videos, and for more see April 2020 interviews with the Supernatural trainers in a post on the Oculus blog and a July 2020 review from Mashable. –Matthew] [Image: Source: Mashable] Working Out in Virtual Reality, I Vanquish My Limited Self By Maggie Lange September 25, 2020 I’ve reached a stage of mourning I never thought would…

[This short story from EdScoop reports on a new, ambitious effort to bring engaging virtual reality experiences to higher education, and includes links to a few similar projects. The original version of the story includes a two-minute video (also available via YouTube) and the press release is available from No Proscenium. –Matthew] Arizona State launches virtual wildlife sanctuary for biology students By Betsy Foresman September 24, 2020 Arizona State University has begun developing new immersive locales using virtual reality, starting with a virtual wildlife sanctuary for biology students. Through a partnership announced last week with the virtual reality company Dreamscape…

[The Financial Times reports on new and earlier efforts to use presence-evoking technology to recreate the experience of busy trading floors; follow the link in the image description for a 3:42 minute video and see the story “Extended Reality offers financial services huge opportunities“ from Consultancy.uk for related information. –Matthew] [Image: Citigroup’s augmented reality workstation, combining 3D holograms and real-time financial data. The bank developed the system four years ago but never implemented it. Credit: Citigroup video via YouTube.] Traders set to don virtual reality headsets in their home offices UBS looks at recreating busy trading floors with London VR…

[The 1:08 minute video included with this press release from Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology via EurekAlert! (and also available on YouTube) isn’t very impressive on its own but it represents an important advance in presence-evoking technology. Optics.org provides a bit more technical information, including this: “[N]one [of the previous approaches] have produced a satisfactory balance between the pixel period, the image intensity, and the achievable frame rate. … [N]one of these methods [to use reconfigurable metasurfaces] has successfully achieved metasurface hologram movies of more than 4 frames per second, according to the TUAT project.” “TUAT took a public…

[The pandemic has increased the potential value of telepresence robots for tourism, with new robots and revenue models on the way. This story is from Skift, where the original includes two more images and a one minute video. –Matthew] Robots Came For Your Jobs, Now They’re Coming for Your Vacations: Here’s How Sean O’Neill, Skift August 28, 2020 SKIFT TAKE: Are there really enough people who want to remote-control a robot and visit places virtually? We’re skeptical. But the founder of the startup Propelmee is surprisingly persuasive at the potential uses for such robots. — Sean O’Neill The robots were…

[Posts here in April and July highlighted the use of cardboard cutouts to provide a sense of the physical presence of people who can’t attend events because of the pandemic. The trend is continuing and expanding, including in my hometown, as reported in this story from The Philadelphia Inquirer (where the original version includes three more pictures). Any web search will reveal many more examples, but here are four that show the breadth of the phenomenon: How Jesús Luzardo connected with family of victim of Florida school shooting through cardboard cutout (Daily Democrat) Conan O’Brien will turn you into a…

[There were several presence-related announcements at this week’s Facebook Connect conference and this story from The Verge touches on them, but it’s particularly interesting because it focuses on how CEO Mark Zuckerberg views the future, including this: “The thing that excites me about virtual and augmented reality is the feeling of presence. The idea that this is the first computing platform in the history of computing, where you really feel like you’re there with another person. Right? Delivering a sense of presence is the thing that I care about. And VR and AR are going to be the technologies that…

[The project described in this story from Rowan University in New Jersey represents a potentially very valuable application of presence-evoking technology.  –Matthew] Bringing STEM careers to rural students: NSF grant will use virtual reality videos to expose high schoolers to in-demand technical careers August 17, 2020 A $496,963 grant from the National Science Foundation will help Rowan University researchers from two colleges introduce STEM careers to high school students in rural South Jersey. Led by professors Sarah Ferguson and Kara Ieva from the College of Education and Christopher Winkler from the Ric Edelman College of Communication & Creative Arts, the…

[The two stories below, from Auganix and Business Up North, describe different efforts to use presence-evoking technology to recreate aspects of the sailing of the English ship Mayflower from England to the New World in 1620 to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the iconic journey. –Matthew] University of Birmingham team creates Virtual Reality reconstruction of the Mayflower pilgrim vessel for 400th anniversary of sailing September 16, 2020 By Sam Sprigg, Managing Editor Experts from the University of Birmingham have developed a virtual reality (VR) reconstruction of the Mayflower, one of the earliest pilgrim vessels and a cultural icon in the…

[We usually assume that photographs, especially modern high-resolution ones, reveal reality and are therefore most likely to evoke presence, but as Ian Bogost points out in The Atlantic, cameras “’make’ images—they don’t ‘capture’ them”; of course the same can be said of our sensory and perceptual apparatus, adding another layer of differences between what exists and what we see (particularly significant ones for those of us with limited vision). It’s only in extreme cases like the many wildfires in California and other West Coast states that the limitations of photographic technology break our normal experience of presence with technology-generated images.…

[When Donald Trump was elected President in 2016 some of us mused that it represented support for the Simulation Argument, that unknown creators of our simulated world had thrown a disruption into the plot for research or entertainment purposes. In the context of the 2020 election amid numerous crises the CounterPunch column below revisits that idea with colorful political rhetoric. As with inverse presence, where the nonmediated seems mediated, it seems likely that these questions about the nature of reality are more prevalent when events and experiences are either unusually negative and disturbing or positive and beautiful. For more on…

[This column from Inside Higher Ed states that we are entering the “Fourth Industrial Revolution…, a way of describing the blurring of boundaries between the physical, digital, and biological worlds,” a movement “from the information age to the experience age.” And it argues that higher education needs to keep up. For specific examples of institutions and people meeting that challenge see the EdTech Magazine story that contains the “experience age” quote, as well as related stories from The Hill and Vox. –Matthew] [Image: With 100 headsets, Colorado State University’s virtual reality space provides both immersion and interaction. Source: EdTech Magazine]…