[The technologies that allow for both dramatic and subtle alterations in the physical appearance of actors in films are evolving quickly, becoming more efficient, affordable and effective at creating presence illusions. This story is from  CBC News and includes three more images and three videos. –Matthew] [Image: While exploring the CGI techniques that have brought back younger versions of stars like Will Smith and Martin Scorsese, CBC’s Eli Glasner got put through the ringer himself [see 4:52 minute video in original story]. Credit: Sharon Wu] How digital de-aging is changing the face of movies More movies are using CGI to let…

[Even if the project described in this Chicago Tribune story doesn’t live up to the claim of “the most realistic digital rendering of a human ever created” it sounds like it’ll evoke a strong sense of “being there” at a famous, important and inspiring historical event. See the original story for a second picture and a 2:21 minute video, and for more information see Time’s “The March” website and its earlier announcement, and the websites of two related projects, the “I Am A Man” VR Experience and North Carolina State University’s Virtual Martin Luther King (vMLK) Project. –Matthew] [Image: Civil…

[Pink Floyd’s “hallucinogenic” music and surreal album art lend themselves to interesting presence experiences (see (e.g., see Goldmine and Bullet Music for examples). Next Reality reports on the use of web-based augmented reality to create the latest generation of Pink Floyd presence; see the original story for four animated gifs. A 0:49 minute video is available on YouTube. For more on the iconic art work see Medium. –Matthew] 8th Wall’s Web AR Brings Album Art of Pink Floyd to Life By Tommy Palladino December 20, 2019 What better band than Pink Floyd, the pioneers of psychedelic and progressive rock, to…

[This informal, frank, first-person story illustrates how those who create presence with perceptually and socially realistic digital characters can inadvertently ‘break’ the experience and create user backlash. It’s from betches, where it includes a different image and embedded tweets; for more details and reactions see Paper and PinkNews. –Matthew] [Image: Source: PinkNews] This CGI Influencer Claimed She Was Sexually Assaulted, And Just No By Dylan Hafer December 17, 2019 Of all the bizarre trends and pop culture moments we’ve been through in 2019, none felt quite as strange as the rise of the CGI influencer. Back in the summer, I…

[It’s always good to remember that presence-evoking technology is far from new. This story from The New York Times (where it includes six more images) describes the experience of using a 70 year old consumer photography and display technology. While it doesn’t use the term (tele)presence, its language will be familiar: Using the hand-held viewer to see a photo taken by the Stereo Realist camera is said to have a “strange, transporting effect — the way, through 3-D magic, a scene from the past can appear ‘shockingly present.’” Even on a projector screen it creates “the impression of time-traveling.” “[W]ith…

[According to this first-person report from CNET, the new Varjo XR-1 high-end virtual and mixed reality headset is capable of creating impressive presence illusions, including the inability to distinguish real and virtual objects. It’s for businesses now but as the author notes may be the future for consumers as well. See the original story for two more images. –Matthew] [Image: In the Varjo XR-1, it’s hard to tell what’s virtual and what’s real. Credit: Jonathan Hirshon] Varjo’s VR headset could finally be ready to replace TVs and monitors The $10,000 reality-blending, mixed-reality XR-1 headset can make 4K TVs and Volvo…

[How strange to know that the people in images we see in the media may not have ever existed; now Motherboard reports that a company will make its collection of AI-generated stock models “customizable and personalizable. Users will be able to algorithmically place any face onto any body in their collection” including their own uploaded pictures. The story addresses some of the ethical concerns; it also includes a 0:41 minute video. See Rosebud AI’s website for more details. –Matthew] This Company Promises to Place Any Face Onto Any Body, Using an Algorithm Rosebud AI wants to add diversity to stock…

[In the context of today’s polarization, it’s worth considering the potential of presence-evoking technologies for engaging, informing and building empathy in the context of not just elections but politics generally. This link-heavy summary of some recent efforts is from Forbes; see the original version for five more pictures. –Matthew] Could Virtual Reality Influence Election Campaigns? Sol Rogers, CEO and Founder of REWIND, an Emmy nominated immersive content studio that fuses bleeding-edge technology with award-winning creative storytelling. December 10, 2019 Politicians always try to adapt to new forms of media to allow them to connect to their voter-base. Consider Franklin D.…

[The New Yorker has a long and lively first person report on a variety of presence experiences via virtual reality; just the beginning and end of the story are below (note the specific reference to presence at the end of the third paragraph and the example of inverse presence at the very end). The original story also includes a 38 minute audio version. The publication has two other recent presence-related stories, one about its new Animate Objects iOS app, “an augmented-reality feature that allows you to discover the secret thoughts of everyday items, as drawn by the New Yorker cartoonist…

[This story from Fast Company describes more evidence that presence-evoking technologies can build empathy and other positive effects, in this case to encourage users to get a flu vaccination. This quote from the research PI is noteworthy: “It turned out that neither the tablet nor the video were able to create this sense of presence, this sense of you feel like you’re involved in the story … The only modality that did that was virtual reality.” By the way, our colleague Sun Joo (Grace) Ahn is one of the project researchers. For more information see coverage by UGA Today and…

[They don’t use the term, but most stories about the new audio erotica website Quinn, including the one below from Wired, discuss presence. Mashable’s begins with this example: “The 10-minute recording features the soft voice of a French man (or at least, a man putting on a French accent) as he fingers his lover — the listener — one last time before he boards a plane to Paris the next morning.” The New York Times’ story quotes a voice-over actress who says contributing to the site allows her to “connect with audiences in a much more intimate way” and notes…

[While in some ways children are more vulnerable to experiencing presence illusions, interesting research reviewed in this story from MIT Technology Review suggests that, sadly given current media and political trends, they’re more skeptical of information from new sources like voice assistants and the internet generally than adults, that “we, as humans, have an ingrained sense of skepticism about unknown sources that somehow gets fuzzier as we grow older.” For more information see the links in the story and a column by Professor Danovitch in The New York Times. –Matthew] Why kids don’t trust Alexa We tend to think of…