[It’s sometimes hard to remember how quickly the technologies behind machines that we speak to and that speak to us have developed, and how many of us are interacting with machines this way (e.g., see a recent Pew Research report). The short story below from Quartz and the audio samples it includes and links to demonstrate how good the technologies are becoming at evoking presence. –Matthew] [Image: A spectrogram for “whoa.” Credit: Lorenzo Tlacaelel] Google’s voice-generating AI is now indistinguishable from humans By Dave Gershgorn December 26, 2017 Humans have officially given their voice to machines. A research paper published…

[This story from TechCrunch by a professional chef highlights three categories of ways presence experiences will shape the food industry, with lots of links to interesting examples. –Matthew] [Image: London’s City Social “Sea Marshall“ augmented reality cocktail. Credit: Addie Chinn. Source: The Telegraph] How augmented and virtual reality will reshape the food industry December 26, 2017 Jenny Dorsey Augmented reality content can be found on everything from wine bottles to IKEA’s catalog and virtual reality experiences are much more detailed, with rich layers of interactivity from hand controllers to gaze triggers, and a VR film has even won an Oscar.…

[This story from Sport Techie is an update on what NFL Films is learning as its team works to create presence experiences of (American) football games (the fact that the new season of NFL Immersed features the Philadelphia Eagles, my hometown team, is purely coincidence!). –Matthew] Virtual Reality Production Enhanced For Docuseries ‘NFL Immersed’ December 20, 2017 Mitch Reames Since its inception in 1964, NFL Films has won more than 100 Emmys for its work documenting the NFL’s stories and gameplay. NFL Films has also extended its work into virtual reality with the show “NFL Immersed.” The first three episodes…

[Here’s another clever application of technology that provides social presence; note the comment from a potential renter that getting a tour of the property “was like having somebody there, just in a different shape.” The story is from CNBC, where it includes a 0:39 minute video report. For more information and a 1:39 minute promotional video see coverage in Curbed SF. A story in Inman has even more information, reporting that “[i]n 2015, the industry reacted somewhat negatively to a company developing similar technology called Zip Tours. Zenplace replaces the handheld video call used by Zip Tours with a taller,…

[Lots of press coverage in the last 24 hours cites the first-person report in Rolling Stone on Magic Leap’s reveal of the company’s first consumer mixed reality product. The abbreviated version of the original story below focuses on the author’s experience using the new technology – note the many indirect mentions of presence factors; see the original story for much more information, several images and a very short video. –Matthew] Magic Leap: Founder of Secretive Start-Up Unveils Mixed-Reality Goggles Rony Abovitz talks with Glixel about the tech and ambitions behind new MR Goggles By Brian Crecente December 20, 2017 Magic…

[Even if I wasn’t one of the many Americans horrified by the nation’s current president, I’d agree with the negative assessments of Disney’s new animatronic version. This story from Quartz (which includes tweets, more images and two videos) reviews the long history of the Hall of Presidents attraction and other failed attempts to produce satisfying, realistic replications of the 45 famous men despite the evolution of technology. –Matthew] Donald Trump and the Hall of Presidents would like to welcome you to your nightmares By Molly Rubin December 19, 2017 Yea, though we walk through the shadow of the uncanny valley,…

[The feature described in this widely-cited story from Gizmodo should make Siri seem more human and thus evoke more medium-as-social-actor presence. The original story includes the patent document, also available from the US Patent Office. Developers can already make Amazon’s Alexa whisper and use other speech skills that make “her” seem more human, as reported earlier this year by TechCrunch (The Verge has a 0:42 minute sample). –Matthew] Apple Wants to Patent a Voice Assistant That Knows When to Whisper Back By Harrison Weber December 14, 2017 Sometimes it feels like we’re inching closer to a future like the movie…

[This story from Quartz highlights our desire to bring realistic simulated versions of objects and stories from popular fiction into our reality via presence-evoking technologies. The original story includes more information, more images and three videos. The reviews of the Lenovo Star Wars: Jedi Challenges AR headset (available from Best Buy) have been positive, for example see the detailed review from Extreme Tech. –Matthew] Bringing the lightsaber from Star Wars—the ultimate toy—to life By Ashley Rodriguez December 15, 2017 Like many American children of his generation, Mike Goslin grew up watching Star Wars. He saw the first movie in theaters…

[The 17 minute documentary included in this story from Discover (and available directly from MEL Films) is a compelling exploration of how virtual reality has helped convict one Nazi War criminal and will be a valuable tool in future trials and the broader task of preserving cultural memory. –Matthew] Virtual Reality Can Help Convict Nazi War Criminals By Jeremy Hsu | December 14, 2017 During World War II, Reinhold Hanning served as a guard at the Auschwitz concentration camp where more than 1.1 million people were killed by Nazi Germany. More than 70 years later, a virtual recreation of Auschwitz helped…

[There’s some skepticism in press coverage of the conceptual plans outlined in this blog post from Airbnb (e.g., in Quartz), but the trend is clearly toward the increasing use of presence-evoking technologies in travel-related industries. –Matthew] Developing the Next Realities for Travel By Airbnb / December 11 2017 At Airbnb, we build technology to push our mission forward to empower guests, hosts, and local communities. Technology powers everything we do—from online interactions on our platform to offline connections in homes, on trips and with different communities across the globe. Technology allows us to increase real-world connections and create more authentic,…

[The perils of presence – “[W]e’re on the verge of living in a world where it’s trivially easy to fabricate believable videos of people doing and saying things they never did. Even having sex.” – is the focus of this story from Motherboard. For more on the Nvidia software see coverage from MIT Technology Review via ISPR Presence News. –Matthew]   AI-Assisted Fake Porn Is Here and We’re All F**ked Someone used an algorithm to paste the face of ‘Wonder Woman’ star Gal Gadot onto a porn video, and the implications are terrifying. Samantha Cole December 11, 2017 There’s a video…

[The rest of the 28:49 minute video on YouTube from June’s SID Display Week 2017 conference included in this short story from Road to VR is interesting, but skip to 19:30 (or even 21:39) for a demonstration of where VR headsets are now in terms of field of view and acuity, and news about a Google project that would dramatically increase the sense of presence evoked by VR and AR displays. –Matthew] [Image: Source: Android Headlines] Google is Developing a VR Display With 10x More Pixels Than Today’s Headsets By Dominic Brennan Dec 11, 2017 Earlier this year, Clay Bavor, VP…