[One of the new features in Adobe’s Photoshop image editing software lets users easily expand the contents of an image beyond the original size and shape, making it that much easier to combine actual and artificial elements in a photo and that much harder for viewers to distinguish between them. The short story below from XDA provides the basic information about “Generative Expand” and Adobe provides details in its blog post and a 3:38 minute video available on YouTube. ZDNet has a detailed, example-filled description of the feature along with Content Aware Fill and Generative Fill; the story also notes…

[An Australia-based company has opened a “Hologram Zoo” in Brisbane and plans to open others around the world. A story from The Debrief and excerpts from coverage in New Atlas provide details (the original versions include more pictures and the New Atlas story includes a video). For a related April 2023 story, see “Researchers Have Developed an Incredible New Method of Producing Realistic Holograms” in The Debrief. –Matthew] [Image: Credit: Axiom Holographics] Journey to the Serengeti or Walk with Dinosaurs at the World’s First “Hologram Zoo” By Tim Mcmillan July 26, 2023 In a futuristic innovation blending technology and wildlife,…

[Imagine a news program, or a whole channel, that features AI-generated anchors and reporters that look and sound exactly like real people, presenting current news stories about topics, events and people you specifically care about, from your political perspective. The stories are written by AI systems that draw on reputable sources and are accompanied by illustrations, charts and graphs, and convincing recreations of events, also all generated by AI. The story from The Hollywood Reporter below describes a startup company’s efforts to create such a channel. It’s certainly an ambitious and interesting project, but would such personalized presence experiences really…

[Before the pandemic, most users of remote conferencing software had only the choice to turn their video camera on or not, but since then the major platforms like Zoom and Microsoft Teams have added a series of increasingly more subtle, realistic and reliable ways for users to alter their appearance, thus increasing the prospects of presence illusions. The latest is described in this story from The Verge (dee the original version for a second image). –Matthew] [Image: It’s not clear if any of these users in Microsoft’s press imagery are “wearing” one of the Maybelline makeup filters, but you can…

[CNBC reports on how and why employers, recruiters and universities are using virtual reality (and presence) to help students experience and learn about office-based careers. See the original story for a second image and for more information visit the Cappfinity website and read the description of the University College Dublin course “Virtual Reality for Future Skills.” –Matthew] [Image: Laura Bedalov, a customer success manager at Cappfinity, sets up the virtual reality workplace environment that colleges and internship programs are using to train young people. Credit: Rebecca Picciotto] Interns and college students are using virtual reality to learn office skills without…

[Aspects of the thought-provoking fictional events in the 2014 film Her are becoming reality, as reported in this story from the Los Angeles Times; see the original version for more pictures and a 6:53 minute video report featuring an interview with the reporter. For more coverage of this phenomenon, see “Uncharted territory: Do AI girlfriend apps promote unhealthy expectations for human relationships?” in The Guardian. –Matthew] [Image: Social media influencer Caryn Marjorie. Credit: Ishan Goel] Thousands chatted with this AI ‘virtual girlfriend.’ Then things got even weirder By Brian Contreras, Staff Writer June 27, 2023 Last month, Caryn Marjorie went…

[Like computers and robots before it, artificial intelligence is taking on new social roles traditionally reserved for humans. An interesting recent example is reported in the story below from the Longmont Leader; a story in Business Today characterizes it this way: “Reece Wiench and Deyton Truitt’s meeting was no surprise in the digital age – they connected through an online dating app. And now, their union is etched in history as ChatGPT adds ‘wedding officiant’ to its diverse job title list.” The same story adds this detail: “According to a report by CBS Colorado, the idea came from the bride’s…

[In a 14-minute segment from the Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) program Think Out Loud, robotics researcher Bill Smart describes an ambitious project to design, create and distribute 50 ‘standardized’ robots to academic researchers to, as he says, “try and figure out what parts of human-human psychology and social interaction carry across to human-robot interaction” – i.e., advance CASA/MASA (Computers Are Social Actors/Media Are Social Actors) research. Follow the link above to the original version of the story to listen to the broadcast, and the link below to the project’s website for more information. –Matthew] [Image: OSU researchers Bill Smart and…

[Another attempt to engage and teach audiences about the realities of climate change is described in this story from Cabin Radio. See the original version for many more images. The Toronto Star has more coverage. And you can visit the Qikiqtaruk: Arctic at Risk website to experience it yourself.  –Matthew] [Image: A permafrost slump as seen in Qikiqtaruk: Arctic at Risk virtual reality] In virtual reality, watch climate change unfold on an Arctic island With a headset, you can see, hear, and soon maybe even smell the change on an island off the Yukon coast. By Chloe Williams July 12,…

[As with the formal Simulation Argument and the eerie alternate realities of The Twilight Zone and other science fiction stories, reports of people experiencing inverse presence (in which the ‘real,’ nonmediated world seems to be mediated by technology) don’t have to be true to be thought-provoking and revealing. The report below from The Independent’s Indy100 website and others like it are more evidence that we’ve “crossed over into” an era dominated by ideas of simulation and illusion. The original report includes the viral video, which is also available (at this writing) on TikTok. –Matthew] [Image: Even the woman’s hair seems…

[This BBC News story is about a husband-and-wife team using VR and presence to make theater productions more engaging and accessible to new audiences. See the original version for three more images and the Box Office VR website for much more information. –Matthew] [Image: Barrie Hunter plays Dundee United manager Jim McLean in the play Smile] Theatres tempt new audiences with virtual reality By Michael Dempsey, Technology of Business reporter July 7, 2023 Roberta Doyle was unnerved when she found herself on the receiving end of a football manager’s rant. Despite just being a member of the audience, the play’s…

[We’ve seen how improvements in artificial intelligence can lead people to misperceive AI-generated images as photographs (e.g., in the ISPR Presence News post “Popular Instagram photographer confesses that his work is AI-generated”); here’s an example of a nested or inverse presence effect in which a photograph was misperceived as having been generated by AI (of course editing in Photoshop and other software makes determining what is ‘real’ that much harder). The story is from PetaPixel; follow the links to the Instagram posts and the story in The Guardian for more information. –Matthew] [Image: Suzi Dougherty’s photo of her son Caspar…