[The conversational artificial intelligence of OpenAI’s ChatGPT is said to be accelerating the timeline for developing the ability for people to create a virtual representation of themself that can interact with family, friends and descendants after they die. The second-to-last paragraph in this report from Motherboard also points out other uses of the integration of AI and VR worlds. See the original story for a second image. –Matthew] [Image: Somnium Space’s Artur Sychov talks to an AI-powered virtual robot that is powered in part by ChatGPT] Founder: You’ll Soon Be Able to Talk to Your Dead Mom In the Metaverse…

[Researchers in The University of Chicago’s Department of Computer Science conducted an interesting study with implications for the design of our electronic devices and the medium-as-social-actor presence experiences they evoke. This UChicago CS News story describes the project and includes two different pictures and a 3:26 minute video (also available on YouTube). –Matthew] UChicago CS Researchers Create Living Smartwatch to Explore Human-Device Relations December 12, 2022 In a paper for UIST 2022, PhD student Jasmine Lu and Assistant Professor of Computer Science Pedro Lopes built a smartwatch that runs on slime mold and requires feeding to function. Devices such as…

[An innovation from MIT holds promise to enhance presence experiences with a variety of media, especially those like virtual and augmented reality that depend on small, close-range displays. The details are in this report from MIT News. –Matthew] [Image: Credit: Illustration by Younghee Lee] Engineers invent vertical, full-color microscopic LEDs Stacking light-emitting diodes instead of placing them side by side could enable fully immersive virtual reality displays and higher-resolution digital screens. By Jennifer Chu, MIT News Office February 1, 2023 Take apart your laptop screen, and at its heart you’ll find a plate patterned with pixels of red, green, and…

[This story from The Guardian describes a new application of presence-evoking deepfake technologies that may provide entertainment but also raises ethical issues; see the original version of the story for three different images and a short video teaser. For a related development, see the We Got This Covered story “‘Family Guy’ imagined by AI as a live-action ’80s sitcom is giving off strong uncanny valley vibes.” –Matthew] [Image: Source: ITVX on Twitter; follow the link for another video teaser] Behind the scenes of TV’s first deep fake comedy: ‘None of it is illegal. Everything is silly’ Is that Harry Kane…

[The new Blended Learning Interactive Simulation Suite (BLISS) at the University of Central Florida uses a variety of presence-evoking technologies to train students and help patients, as reported by UCF Today. See the original story for a second image and a 40 second video (also available on YouTube) and for more coverage see local TV news coverage from WESH 2 and WFTV 9. –Matthew] [Image: A physical therapy student works with a manikin in the College of Health Professions and Sciences’ Blended Learning Interactive Simulation Suite.] New Immersive Simulation Suite Will Teach UCF Students, Help Patients The hands-on tech will…

[This is an entertaining and very meta conversation between a National Post columnist and ChatGPT that illustrates the power of this version of AI to evoke medium-as-social-actor presence. See the original story for two more images and excerpts of conversations with other ChatGPT personas. –Matthew] ‘I am not a human — but I am trying’: An interview with an AI chatbot Even while admitting that ‘she’ is just a collection of code, ‘Daisy Chatbot’ had columnist Chris Knight all but convinced there was a sentience behind her sentences By Chris Knight January 19, 2023; updated January 21, 2023 Artificial Intelligence…

[If the philosophical argument that we are all living in a giant computer simulation were true, all of our experiences would be presence experiences. Aside from demonstrating how technology-generated simulation is a dominant metaphor for how (many of us) live in the 21st century, the idea also prompts intriguing questions about religion, morality and mortality (see Jones, Lombard and Jasak, 2011). While it’s presumptuous to think we’d ever be able to change the simulation directly or otherwise, this New York Times article describes how a computer scientist explored how that would work and what changes we might request. See David…

[CTV News reports on a recent demonstration of presence-evoking technologies being developed to enhance the way fans, and players and coaches, experience sports. See the original story for more pictures and a short video. More details are in an excerpt from coverage by Yahoo! Sports that follows below; for more information see the SportsX website. In a related National Basketball Association press release, the NBA and Meta announced that they will provide “52 live NBA League Pass games – including five immersive 180-degree monoscopic live VR games in 2880 resolution – in ‘NBA Arena’ in Meta Horizon Worlds. Fans can…

[This abridged-but-still-long, example and link-filled blooploop story provides an overview of the many ways technologies are being used in the attractions industry to produce immersive, engaging and profitable presence experiences. See the original version of the story for 21 more images. –Matthew] Top 9 technology trends in the attractions industry for 2023 Find out more about this year’s top technology trends, from gamification to robots By Bea Mitchell January 12, 2023 Technology is advancing at an exponential rate. The attractions and entertainment sector is using many emerging technologies as tools to bring stories to life. Some of the top technology…

[This short Game Rant story describes a recent Warner Bros. patent submission for a social robot in video games (but logically soon for embodied robots) that analyzes “a person’s nonverbal social cues to detect things like emotional states and desires” and then interacts with the user based on this information, enhancing their medium-as-social-actor presence experience. Of course, as the story notes, the technology suggests dangers as well. You can see a second image in the original story and read the patent application at Patentscope. –Matthew] Warner Bros. Working on Virtual Robot to Interact with Players in Video Games By Chris…

[This story from Fast Company describes how a new service from Sony will let users feel like they’re in space taking photographs of Earth. The vision of an expanded set of experiences of remote locations that the author describes in the last paragraph is already coming true. See the original story for six different images and a 1:38 minute video (also available via YouTube) and for more details see coverage from Adorama (including a second video; also on YouTube) and the Star Sphere website. –Matthew] [Image: Source: Digital Camera World] Sony’s new space camera will help you feel like an…

[A “cat and mouse game” is taking place between computer scientists working to improve the ability of generative artificial intelligence software like ChatGPT to mimic human writing, and other computer scientists working to improve software that distinguishes machine- and human-generated text. But without sophisticated detection tools we’re all increasingly likely to experience a form of presence in which we overlook the role of technology in the creation of text we encounter, as teachers reading assignments or as consumers of news (and entertainment, etc. – e.g., see TheLatestBot). The story below from Inside Higher Ed explores the state-of-the-art and implications of the…