[The fast-food chain Wendy’s plans to replace human order-takers for its drive-through service with a more efficient AI chatbot, creating a medium-as-social-actor presence illusion in which “You won’t know you’re talking to anybody but an employee.” Most of the press coverage draws on this story from The Wall Street Journal. Fortune adds these details: “Opinions on what AI will mean for workers and companies vary greatly, from massive disruption to marginal change. In the view of Presto Automation, which offers an AI ordering platform for restaurants, the technology will shake up the industry. ‘I don’t think in three years, there’s going…

[Here’s a first-person report from Gizmodo on a demonstration of the latest version of Google’s Project Starline telepresence system, which was initially a large booth and is now reduced to a large flat screen monitor. See other first-person reports from Engadget and TechCrunch. The TechCrunch story includes a technical description: “Quoting from a Google research publication on the technology: ‘Our system achieves key 3D audiovisual cues (stereopsis, motion parallax, and spatialized audio) and enables the full range of communication cues (eye contact, hand gestures, and body language), yet does not require special glasses or body-worn microphones/headphones. The system consists of…

[A new study supports the use of joyful and calming music to reduce cybersickness caused by virtual reality experiences. The study is described in this news release from The University of Edinburgh. In the researchers’ published article, they write that the results “support the notion that pleasant music is efficient in mitigating cybersickness due to distraction from stimuli, as well as an elicitation of positive emotions.” and “In summary, the implementation of music appears to be a cost-effective, suitable (i.e., without preventing other interactions or breaking the immersion), and efficient technique for mitigating cybersickness in immersive VR.” –Matthew] [Image: Credit:…

[Not only are researchers linking conversational AI to digital avatars (as in an ISPR Presence News post last week), making them more likely to evoke medium-as-social-actor presence, they’re using AI to make embodied robots more capable of human-like behavior and interactions. Here are highlights of a March 2023 VICE story titled “Big tech is now developing powerful AI brains for real-world robots. Building on recent AI advancements to allow robots to complete tasks autonomously in the real world is a ‘major step forward,’ researchers say.”: Researchers at Google and the Berlin Institute of Technology have released an AI model called…

[Fast-evolving artificial intelligence technologies are making it increasingly difficult to “accurately acknowledge the role of the technology in [our] experience,” in other words, they’re making presence more likely and common. This essay by Stanford Professor Victor Lee in The Conversation explains how generative AI requires us to “reexamine and recalibrate” our assumptions about the roles of technology – the authenticity – in many of our experiences. –Matthew] [Image: Generative AI thrives on exploiting people’s reflexive assumptions of authenticity by producing material that looks like ‘the real thing.’ Credit: artpartner-images/The Image Bank via Getty Images] Generative AI is forcing people to…

[Researchers continue to look for a practical and effective way to add smells, and taste, to presence experiences. The Scientific American story below describes a new effort that solves some long-standing problems, and the excerpt from coverage in MIT Technology Review that follows it provides more details. See the new article in Nature Communications for more information and three short videos. –Matthew] [Image: The first part of Figure 4a in “Soft, miniaturized, wireless olfactory interface for virtual reality“: “A demonstration of the skin-integrated Device 1 in displaying olfaction feedback for providing an immersive experience to users during movie watching. Here,…

[In a logical step to increase our experiences of social presence when we interact with artificial intelligence, instead of having to type and read text, the Call Annie app described in this story from ZDNet lets you have an audio-visual conversation (in the form of a faux video call) with a virtual avatar of the AI software. See also a story from KOIN 6 in Portland, Oregon that features a 6:17 minute television interview with Bubbles, another avatar for ChatGPT; you can have a visual conversation with “her” too, here. –Matthew] [Image: Credit: Screenshots by Lance Whitney/ZDNET] This free iPhone…

[The new free iOS app Hotshot uses image generating AI to create photos of users and anyone in their contacts doing “anything.” If the images it produces aren’t convincingly real now it’s hard to imagine they won’t be soon. The story below from Futurism, supplemented by excerpts from The Chainsaw, provides details. Wonderful Engineering echoes other coverage with the statement that the app “raises important questions regarding ownership, consent, and authenticity. Genuine human connections cannot ultimately be supplanted by manufactured experiences and visuals.” Mosaic ML has an interview with the co-founders of the company behind the app, Natural Synthetics, that…

[A new device developed by researchers at the University of Chicago enhances presence illusions by making the sensations of jumping or falling in virtual reality more realistic, as reported in this short story from New Scientist. See the original version of the story for a 41 second video (also available on YouTube). You can also watch the 10-minute presentation recorded at the CHI 2023 conference on YouTube, read the published paper in the CHI Proceedings (where it includes three different videos), and find more presence-related information on Professor Pedro Lopes’ website. –Matthew] Mechanical backpack boosts the sensation of jumping in…

[As a decades-long fan of Star Trek, I couldn’t not post this news about a new online recreation of the bridge of every iteration of the U.S.S. Enterprise. This story from Gizmodo captures the appeal of the spatial, if not social, presence experiences the virtual recreations are said to offer. Coverage from The Verge adds this detail: “The Roddenberry Archive and OTOY say they’ll be adding the voice of Majel Roddenberry, who played several roles, including the ship’s computer, to the archive ‘in the coming months.’ Her son Rod says that in 2008, Majel ‘meticulously recorded her voice phonetically, with…

[It’s amazing how many applications there are for technologies that evoke (in this case spatial) presence. This story is from The Fabricator, where it includes two more images. –Matthew] [Image: In this augmented reality gas metal arc welding setup, a student lays down a virtual bead.] How augmented reality is being used to train the next generation of welders AR can change how welding students learn the trade before they strike their first real arc By Tim Heston May 1, 2023 It’s a black art. I used to hear that a lot on fab shop tours—code for something that took…

[This NPR story describes how easy it is becoming to create a deepfake video of yourself or someone else, and the dangers these presence-evoking videos (in which the hard-to-detect use of technology distorts our perceptions and understanding of reality) pose for us as individuals and society. The original version of the story includes two embedded tweets with videos. See also the follow-up NPR story “AI-Gnerated Deepfakes are Moving Fast. Policymakers Can’t Keep Up” by the same author. In “Chinese Company Lets You Make a Deepfake ‘Digital Human’ for $145” PetaPIxel reports on how you can create a deepfake with even…