[As some of us have with presence and presence-related terminology, the author of this essay in VentureBeat argues that we need to “tame the jargon” related to mixed and virtual reality and the metaverse. While the essay doesn’t credit the people who developed the “reality-virtuality continuum,” it provides useful insights about design considerations for current and future presence experiences. Here’s the missing citation (you can download the article from ResearchGate): Milgram, P., Takemura, H., Utsumi, A., & Kishino, F. (December 21, 1995). “Augmented reality: A class of displays on the reality-virtuality continuum.” Proceedings of SPIE 2351, Telemanipulator and Telepresence Technologies.…

[The author of this story from Business Insider describes her “undeniably cool” spatial and social presence experiences in a demonstration of the high-end Meta Quest Pro headset in the company’s Horizon Worlds Workrooms meeting environments, as well as the significant challenges to making the technology an effective alternative to in-person meetings and standard video conferencing platforms. See the original story for two more pictures.  –Matthew] I tried out Meta’s $1,500 virtual reality headset to attend a meeting in the metaverse. The tech was undeniably cool, but after 20 minutes I was relieved to take it off. By Sawdah Bhaimiya December…

[A long first-person essay in n+1 magazine describes the author’s experiences maintaining the medium-as-social-actor presence illusion that a chatbot is a human being. The Guardian published a shorter version and the version below (which combines elements of the headlines from each) retains material I thought particularly relevant to presence. See the other versions for more examples, details and observations from the author. –Matthew] [Image: Rochelle Goldberg, Consent (detail). 2022, concrete, shellac, acrylic paint, steel cables, wire, and cell phones. Dimensions variable. Credit: Photo by Roberto Marossi. Courtesy of the artist and Galleria Federico Vavassori.] HUMAN_FALLBACK Becoming a chatbot: My life…

[In a years-long interdisciplinary initiative, researchers are using presence-evoking technologies to help doctors better understand and treat cancerous tumors. As two key quotes from this Cancer Research UK story put it: “[Cancer researchers] never actually get to see what they’re working on; they never actually get to visually and viscerally see the results of the things that they’re doing.”… “By making it possible to look at tumours as they appear in the body, and not just as isolated clumps of data about individual cells, IMAXT could take analysing biopsies to the next level.” See the original story for more pictures…

[This story from MIXED summarizes the views of business and technology experts regarding the status, challenges, promise and likely future of the so-called “metaverse,” including key presence-evoking technologies. See the original version for three infographics. For more about the Gartner technology research and consulting firm and its 2022 IT Symposium see the company’s website. –Matthew] Schrödinger’s Metaverse: Both hype and reality – Outlook Some preach the metaverse while others have nothing to do with it. What do experts say? I was at the Gartner IT Symposium 2022 and these are the trends for the next few years. By Dr. Rolf…

[The author of this essay in Fast Company presents an interesting framework that, while not using presence terminology, distinguishes social and perceptual realism and predicts ways in which their combination will create more (and arguably more compelling) presence experiences. See the original version for six more images.  –Matthew] Fictional reality: Why the real metaverse doesn’t require a headset AI is letting us live out alternative realities on the digital platforms where we already spend our time online. By Michael Mignano December 9, 2022 Much has been said of, written about, and invested in the “metaverse.” For the uninitiated, the metaverse…

[We’re back after a two-week hiatus… This story from PetaPixel illustrates the rapid evolution of AI and its ability to create convincing presence experiences for both consumers and creators. See the original story for five more images and Kyle Vorbach’s 10:15 minute video (also available on YouTube).  –Matthew] Man Fakes an Entire Month of His Life Using AI Generated Photos By Jaron Schneider December 14, 2022 Self-described writer and director Kyle Vorbach realized that by specifically training the Stable Diffusion artificial intelligence (AI) image generator, he could create realistic photos that never happened. So he did, and faked a whole…

[With BMW’s M Mixed Reality system, the driver of a real car on a real road wears an immersive head mounted display in which they see a digitally augmented virtual version of the real road. The author of this story from Car & Driver tried it out and reports on his presence experience. See the original story for three more images, a 3:14 minute Car & Driver video of the experience, and a second 1:13 minute BMW video (also available on YouTube). NOTE: ISPR Presence News will be on hiatus for the next two weeks but will return on December…

[Hiroshima University psychologist Mayu Koike and her colleagues are studying the potential positive effects of relationships with computer generated personae; they hope to “cultivate a new field named ‘romantic anthropomorphism,’ bridging the gap between anthropomorphism and relationship science.” Interesting details are reported in this story from WebMD.  –Matthew] Loving a Fake Person: Redefining Romance for the Virtual Age By Bill Stieg December 2, 2022 When a young man finds himself falling for a 300-year-old cyborg in the 2019 sci-fi film Alita: Battle Angel, they share the following exchange: “Does it bother you,” the cyborg (Alita) asks, “that I’m not completely…

[This story from Virginia Commonwealth University describes an ideal use case for presence-evoking virtual reality: a common medical procedure that’s difficult to perform and expensive and risky to learn with human patients. The story also makes clear the importance of having an interdisciplinary university (or other) infrastructure supporting this kind of valuable project. More information is available on the website of VCU’s Launching Excellent in VR (LEVR) Center. –Matthew] [Image: Credit: Karl Steinbrenner] How virtual reality training may improve ‘blind’ surgery to treat female urinary incontinence VCU’s Lauren Siff leads interdisciplinary effort to build a virtual-reality training application to help…

[The latest artificial intelligence-chatbot, ChatGPT, is impressing experts and the public but also raising serious concerns, as reported in the story below from The New York Times (where the original includes examples of chat transcripts). Coverage from Slate characterizes the progress ChatGPT represents this way: “[W]e’ve come a long way from the early days of the chatbot hype wave. Not long ago, Facebook promised these bots would be its next big platform, Microsoft pitched them as fun companions, and others raced to claim credit for leading the revolution. But these chatbots were so bad that people stopped using them.…

[This Washington Post story describes a partnership between Storyfile and Proto, two companies that create technologies to evoke presence (and which have been the subject of previous ISPR Presence News posts). The story says a new life-like hologram of Walmart founder Sam Walton at the company’s museum in Arkansas “hints at a new frontier, one in which long-dead icons mingle among us, head-spinningly erasing the line between not just virtual and real but present and past, dead and alive.” –Matthew] [Image: A hologram of Walmart founder Sam Walton holds court in front of a room in Bentonville, Ark., right before…