[Penn State News provides this report on the use of virtual reality in Criminal Justice and other courses at Pennsylvania State University’s Harrisburg campus. Among other observations it’s interesting that the report says that “employers are looking for experience with [VR] on résumés.” See the original story for a photo gallery containing nine more images and a 2:05 minute video (also available on YouTube). –Matthew] [Image: Credit: Sharon Siegfried / Penn State] Virtual reality enhances learning for Harrisburg criminal justice students October 3, 2023 MIDDLETOWN, Pa. — They didn’t leave their seats in the Olmsted Building classroom, but Penn State…

[Many writers are covering and/or commenting on a new technique that uses artificial intelligence to incorporate ‘hidden’ messages in images (with varying degrees of presence-evoking subtlety). The Motherboard story below has a more serious tone while the Laptop Mag story that follows it takes a lighter approach. For more examples of the technique see coverage in Bored Panda, and if you’re interested in creating images yourself, Michael Brig has a four-minute tutorial on YouTube. –Matthew] AI-Generated ‘Subliminal Messages’ Are Going Viral. Here’s What’s Really Going On They’re not going make you subconsciously crave McDonald’s, but they are pretty cool as…

[The first of a series of concerts by U2 yielded a series of very positive assessments of the new Las Vegas venue known as the Sphere. This review from CNN provides a particularly good description, and the original story includes three different pictures and a 2:10 video. Coverage from Deadline features more images and videos and notes that “Reviewers were beside themselves to come up with superlatives that could adequately convey the venue’s multimedia. They called the $2.3 billion Sphere a ‘stunning spectacle’ (USA Today), ‘mind blowing’ (The Verge), and ‘utterly astonishing’ (The Guardian), among other media kudos.”…

[As reported in this story from the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, UT Austin researchers have outfitted Meta virtual reality headsets with soft, noninvasive EEG sensors to enable measurement and assessment of brain activity as wearers interact with virtual environments and experience presence. See the original story for a second image, and for detailed information see the open access article in Soft Science. –Matthew] Modified Virtual Reality Tech Can Measure Brain Activity August 3, 2023 Researchers have modified a commercial virtual reality headset, giving it the ability to measure brain activity and examine how…

[Press coverage of a video demonstration of Meta’s latest avatar technology seems to be universally positive. In the video, podcaster and MIT researcher Lex Fridman interviews Mark Zuckerberg using the technology, as reported in the story below from Futurism. Fridman introduces the hour-long video in a post to his 3 million X (Twitter) followers this way: “This was one of the most incredible experiences of my life. It really felt like we were talking in-person, but we were miles apart. It’s hard to put into words how awesome this was for someone like me who values the intimacy of in-person…

[A post on the blog of digital product studio Ustwo describes how exploring perceptions of AI characters in popular culture portrayals can help designers make better decisions about the presence-evoking products they create for users. See the original post for a second image. –Matthew] We can’t erase our pop culture perceptions of AI – let’s build on them Sci-fi AI characters can help us design better Alice Piterova, Product Principal September 24, 2023 When I worked in the UK’s All-Party Parliamentary Group on AI, many of the experts who presented around AI’s potential impact shared a common concern: that because…

[The use of teleoperation in police work has been considered before (e.g., see the 2019 ISPR Presence News post “A telepresence robot for police traffic stops” and the 2016 post “The legal and ethical ramifications of letting police kill suspects with robots”), but this essay from Police1 examines the potential benefits and challenges of using holographic police officers to keep both the public and police officers safe. See the original version for a video of the Portl platform. –Matthew] Could holographic officers improve safety and enhance trust? The technology could transform interactions with the public and improve responses to dangerous…

[Survivors of torture in an infamous Venezuelan prison are using virtual reality and the presence it evokes to bring awareness and empathy regarding the abuse to politicians and the public, and hopefully bring about political action to stop it, as reported in this story from The Washington Post. See the original story for more photos, a 1:27 video, and links to related coverage including a March 2023 story about Venezuela’s use of deepfakes to report false positive news stories. –Matthew] [Image: A person standing near Times Square wears a VR headset screening an immersive experience of the conditions at El…

[The NBC Bay Area television station covered the interesting story of teacher, artist, collector and presence illusion creator Joshua Ellingson; see the original story for the station’s 3:02 minute video report, and for much more information and many videos visit Ellingson’s website. –Matthew] [Image: A Pepper’s Ghost illusion of a goldfish swims beneath a plastic globe in the apartment of San Francisco artist Joshua Ellingson.] San Francisco artist finds popularity with old-time illusions By Joe Rosato Jr. August 28, 2023 Inside his 600-square-foot San Francisco apartment, Joshua Ellingson was outnumbered about 20 to one by vintage television sets, a collection…

[The story below from Decrypt reports that over a thousand people recently attended a runway fashion show that featured only holographic figures, and “numerous audience members” were moved to tears “despite the fact that nothing they had seen, technically speaking, physically existed.” See the original story for four more pictures and two videos, and for more information see the event’s press release via FashionUnited. –Matthew] Hologram Runway Wows Crowds at Amsterdam Fashion Week Future Front Row seeks to chart an immersion-first path forward for the digital fashion industry after packing the house in Amsterdam. By Sander Lutz September 11, 2023…

[The self-driving car company Wayve is using conversational large language model-based artificial intelligence to “talk” to its cars and ask them questions about what they see and how they make decisions as they drive. The company also is training the AI by having expert human drivers explain their perceptions and decisions as they drive. While this article from MIT Technology Review focuses on the important practical benefits of the approach, which has already been used with robots but not cars, the experience of conversing with embodied AI in both cases seems very likely to evoke an increasingly compelling form of…

[Another incisive column from technology writer Mike Elgan in Computerworld predicts that despite some companies’ mandates that their employees return to full-time office work, the shift to flexible work-from-home schedules established during the pandemic will continue: “Remote work is the future of work” (which means that presence-evoking technologies will be increasingly vital). –Matthew] [Image: A reception desk at Amazon offices in downtown Seattle, Washington. Credit: Glen Chapman/AFP/Getty Images. Source: CNBC] Amazon’s return-to-office mandate won’t work out No matter how many companies demand that their employees return to the office, the shift to remote work that occurred during the pandemic isn’t…