[The UK attraction Bletchley Park is working with AI character development company 1956 Individuals to create a new AI-based interactive experience that recreates mathematician and “father of computer science and artificial intelligence” Alan Turing in digital form. The AI-based Turing will use facial recognition to customize interactions with visitors. The press coverage is based on this short press release from 1956 Individuals. According to an April 2024 story in PC Magazine, a Singapore company recently appointed an ethically dubious AI version of Turing as its “chief AI officer,” accessible at the Genius Team website. –Matthew] [Image: Source: Experience UK] Bletchley…

[This story from Dallas Innovates reports on the origins, co-founders, business strategies and product features of a new competitor in the telepresence product market. The PeerVsn system emphasizes life-size scale, portability and flexibility. See the original version of the story for eight different pictures. More information is available on the PeerVsn website, and two short videos from InfoComm 2024 are available on YouTube here and here. –Matthew] [Image: A PeerVsn unit displaying “Let’s Co-Create Powerful Presence” during December 2023 soft launch at Digital Signage Expo. Source: PeerVsn Facebook page.] Telepresence Tech: Two Dallas Digital Pioneers Team Up to Launch Life-Size…

[Technology expert Shelly Palmer posted this short blog entry that highlights current stories in the press to illustrate that we may not recognize it yet, but a future in which it is nearly impossible to accurately perceive the role of technology when we consume media content and interact via media is already here. For more on the first of the two stories he highlights, see the ISPR Presence News post “A parody ad shared by Elon Musk clones Kamala Harris’ voice, raising concerns about AI in politics.” For more information about the second story see “Instagram starts letting people create…

[I wonder what Marvin Minsky would think of this. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and MIT have developed a new and more “immersive” and “intuitive” teleoperation system that allows an operator to control a robot even when they’re thousands of miles apart. This story is from VentureBeat, where the original includes three different images; see the Open-TeleVision project page on GitHub for much more information and lots of videos (this one on GitHub and YouTube is particularly worth watching to get a sense of how the system works and some of its potential uses). –Matthew] [Image:…

[Another use of deepfake technology in politics with the potential to mislead viewers is in the news; this story from AP provides the details. You can evaluate the video for yourself at X-user Mr Reagon’s original (and labelled) post. An excerpt from coverage by the CBC follows the story below. –Matthew] [Image: Source: CBC] A parody ad shared by Elon Musk clones Kamala Harris’ voice, raising concerns about AI in politics By Ali SwensonJuly 29, 2024 NEW YORK (AP) — A video that uses an artificial intelligence voice-cloning tool to mimic the voice of Vice President Kamala Harris saying things she…

[Here’s a first-person report from Android Central on what it’s like to use the virtual reality app from the NBC television network’s Peacock streaming channel in a Meta Quest 3 headset to watch the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris (an experience I assume is similar in other headsets including the Apple Vision Pro). Here’s a key quote about presence from near the end: “Being able to take the coverage with me around the house is brilliant, and watching that same coverage in a personal movie theater is unforgettable, but if I’m doing this in VR I want to feel like…

[This story from Wired about the slow adoption of virtual reality for remote work in offices includes many of the explanations and predictions voiced by scholars in the presence community. –Matthew] [Image: Credit: Wired Staff; Getty Images] The Metaverse Was Supposed to Be Your New Office. You’re Still on Zoom Tech founders painted a vision of employees clocking into virtual workplaces. But the adoption of VR at work has been slow. By Amanda HooverJuly 14, 2024 When Mark Zuckerberg rebranded Facebook as Meta in 2021, he estimated the metaverse could reach a billion people over a decade. Not long after,…

[As reported in this story from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a diverse team of doctors, professors and graduate students is creating an ambitious three-module training program that uses virtual reality and presence to help medical professionals, initially those involved with maternal care, experience and understand how implicit bias based on race and gender harms patients and increase the cultural competency skills needed to improve patient care. See the original story for two more images and follow one of the links at the end below for the new article about the project in the journal Health Communication. –Matthew] [Image:…

[A new story from Indy100 led me to this earlier one from Comic Sands about a technology-generated illusion that many people interpreted as evidence for the Simulation Argument that we are all living in the ultimate presence-evoking simulation. See the original Comic Sands story for more images and reactions; coverage from UNILAD includes the recap video from the person at the center of the story, Tessa Coates; and user iPhonedo explains and even recreates the illusion in a 10:42 minute YouTube video. –Matthew] Bride-To-Be Horrified After Unedited Wedding Dress Photo Captures Bizarre ‘Glitch In The Matrix’ Instagram user Tessa Coates…

[The author of this story from Space.com describes what it’s like to stand, walk on, and jump off of (!) a virtual version of a distant asteroid only visited by human-made unmanned spacecraft. It also mentions and provides a link regarding the experience of attending an academic conference in VR. See the original version for three more images. –Matthew] Jumping on an asteroid: How VR is being used to visit worlds we can never reach There was something about this experience that felt “sticky.” By Jackson RyanJuly 7, 2024 I’m standing so close to JAXA’s Hayabusa2 asteroid lander that I…

[Here’s a story about another very positive application of presence: The philanthropic Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has collaborated with immersive experiences company REM5 Studios to produce and distribute a video for virtual reality headsets designed to raise awareness and resources to rid the world of the last cases of polio. The story from the Star Tribune provides the details; the original version includes the trailer for “Polio’s Last Mile” (it’s also available on YouTube). See the REM5 website for more information. –Matthew] [Image: At a Rotary conference in Singapore, attendees watch an immersive video created by REM5 that shows…

[In this essay from The Conversation, a group of researchers from Australia’s Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) describe their work on an interesting application of presence that has implications for the design of food for long-term space missions and people on Earth who live in “isolated or confined environments, such as nursing home residents, individuals on military deployment, and submarine crews.” Follow the link to the group’s new publication in the fourth paragraph for much more information. –Matthew] [Image: Participants smelled different scents while immersed in a VR space station environment. Credit: Seamus Daniel / RMIT University] Astronauts don’t…