[The nonprofit organization AIandYou works to increase “AI literacy” to help the public avoid being manipulated by technologies that use artificial intelligence. As Politico reports, AIandYou is planning a campaign that uses deepfake technologies to demonstrate and educate the public about their use in the 2024 elections. Watch the 5:25 minute video mentioned in the story and see the AIandYou website for much more information. In related news, see the NPR story “Video game clips and old videos are flooding social media about Israel and Gaza,” the NPR audio report “Detangling the online disinformation about the war between Israel and…

[There’s a new development in the ongoing debate about the possibility that our universe is a sophisticated, presence-evoking simulation. The details are reported in this story from ScienceAlert, where the original version includes a second image and an 11:47 minute video (also available on YouTube). While the debate will probably never be resolved, the continuing and apparently growing fascination in science and popular culture with the idea that everything we experience is an illusion is consistent with the fact that we’re living in an era in which humans are using technologies to produce increasingly more, and more convincing, illusions.…

[A new augmented reality public art project in Philadelphia features photographs and interviews with some of the diverse people who work and travel on the buses, trains and trolleys of SEPTA (the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority). As the artist, Anula Shetty, notes, “the goal is to create connections between people who cross paths during their daily commute”; QR codes are embedded in photos displayed throughout the system and as this SEPTA blog post puts it, “Through this augmented reality series of works born of Philadelphian stories, daydreams, thoughts, and performances that Shetty has filmed – Philly Daydreams allows travelers to…

[Presence-evoking augmented reality and artificial intelligence are being used to help more people experience and learn about the monuments and history of Greece, as reported by the Associated Press via ABC News. See the Greek telecom company Cosmote’s website for more, including a 2:19 minute video (also available on YouTube).  –Matthew] [Image: A man holds up a tablet showing a digitally overlayed virtual reconstruction of the ancient Parthenon temple, at the Acropolis Hill in Athens, Greece on Tuesday, June 13, 2023. Credit: Petros Giannakouris/The Associated Press.] An app shows how ancient Greek sites looked thousands of years ago.…

[Though he doesn’t use the term, the writer of this essay in The Verge describes how the nascent status of AI-based voices and images being added to social media platforms could lead to a dramatic increase in experiences of presence, especially medium-as-social-actor presence: “feeds that were once defined by the connections they enabled between human beings will have become something else: a partially synthetic social network.” –Matthew] [Image: Credit: Álvaro Bernis / The Verge] The synthetic social network is coming Between ChatGPT’s surprisingly human voice and Meta’s AI characters, our feeds may be about to change forever By Casey Newton,…

[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…