[This BBC News story describes efforts to use presence-evoking VR to prepare students for job interviews with prospective employers (who may also use VR to conduct interviews). Coverage from Inavate includes this: “Users get feedback on their answers, as well as how the answer was given, whether the interviewee is maintaining eye contact with the avatar as well as the participant’s posture throughout the interview. The trial will see more than 10,000 learners accessing the experience, with findings due to be published in January 2023. Sandwell College, a UK based school, took part in the programme, with 84% of participants…

[A new company lead by ex-Google AI experts is bringing the latest chatbot technology directly to consumers so that they can experience medium-as-social-actor presence with a wide variety of personas, despite the inherent dangers of “bias, inaccuracy, and people’s tendency to ‘anthropomorphize and extend social expectations to nonhuman agents,’ even when they’re explicitly aware that they are interacting with an AI.” The details (and in the original version, examples and more images) are provided in this story from The Washington Post. See also the closely related Yahoo! News story “An Elon Musk chatbot tells Insider he wants to buy CNN,…

[Despite its extreme and disturbing nature, a new blog post by the virtual reality pioneer who founded Oculus about his creation of an apparently operational VR headset that can kill the user raises interesting questions about the potential blurring of physical and virtual experience. The story from Vice below provides the basic details, and a March 2021 story from Futurism notes Palmer Luckey’s earlier interest in games that can kill. New stories in Road to VR and Ars Technica note and link to examples of less severe but still impactful consequences for user failures in virtual reality. And We Got…

[If you’re a David Byrne and/or Talking Heads fan like me you’ll be especially interested in this story from Westword that describes his latest project, a personalized, experiential, immersive experience inspired by neuroscience experiments that illustrate the subjective nature of perception and memory. Note the hopeful message at the end of the story. See the original version for a 30 second promotional video and Colorado Springs Indy for a 43 minute Radiolab interview with Byrne about the project. –Matthew] David Byrne’s Mind-Bending, Multi-Sensory Theater of the Mind Is Open in Denver By Emily Ferguson August 29, 2022 What is reality?…

[TechCrunch reports on a startup company offering another alternative to Zoom and other collaboration platforms. The Roam “office building in the cloud” is said to provide an overview of where distributed team members are and what they’re working on, which the CEO calls “project presence.” See the original story for a second image and coverage in CNBC for more details including these: “[CEO Howard] Lerman was inspired to found Roam after he accidentally forgot to invite a co-worker to a large Zoom call, he said. He realized there was no way for an outsider to tell that people were meeting,…

[The human-like robot arms and hands described in this story from Interesting Engineering seem certain to evoke medium-as-social-actor presence; see the original story for two videos (also available on YouTube here and here). For more information see coverage in New Atlas and designboom as well as the Clone Robotics website. –Matthew] Video: Here is a spooky robotic arm that can fool people into believing it’s a real human hand Beware! This robotic arm has a powerful grip. By Rupendra Brahambhatt October 10, 2022 What would be your first reaction when you see a grey-colored robotic hand mimicking your real hand’s…

[Suggesting a new meaning for the acronym CASA (car, rather than computer, as social actor), a new study from The University of Tokyo suggests that giving self-driving vehicles eyes that indicate the vehicle’s “attention” will improve how people interact with the vehicles and save lives. Note that the study itself was conducted via a presence-evoking experience in virtual reality. See the original story for more images, and follow the links at the end for more information (including a 1:52 minute video also available on YouTube). –Matthew] [Image: The Gazing Car. The cart was fitted with robotic eyes which could be moved…

[This news from Indiana University describes a creative and potentially valuable application of presence to help people recover from substance abuse disorders. See the new publication in Discover Mental Health for many more details.  –Matthew] [Image: Figure 1 from “Virtual reality intervention effects on future self-continuity and delayed reward preference in substance use disorder recovery: pilot study results”: Avatar rendering. The senior author’s A) Current Self avatar, and age-progressed 15 years, B) SUD Future Self, and C) Recovery Future Self] IU researcher creates virtual reality experiences to aid substance use disorder recovery October 19, 2022 Indiana University researchers are combining…

[This story from The Daily Beast is about efforts to simulate near death experiences and replicate some of the insights and perspective changes they can bring. See the original version for a seven minute video (also available via YouTube). For related stories about presence and death see “People Are Going Full ‘Black Mirror’ to Bring Back the Dead: What these businesses are doing for grieving and loss is what Uber did for taxis and buses: disrupting, innovating, and making things a whole lot more complicated” also from The Daily Beast, and “Technology that lets us “speak” to our dead relatives…

[A new room at the University of California, Davis is designed to evoke (spatial) presence to more accurately measure reactions to food and other products; see the original version of the story below from the University for more pictures and a 1:41 minute video (also available on YouTube).  –Matthew] [Image: Julien Delarue, associate professor in sensory and consumer science, in the new multi-sensory immersive room at UC Davis] New Sensory Immersive Room at UC Davis Simulates Real-Life Environments for Product Testing Space Features 360-Degree Video Experience With Variable Sounds, Smells and Air Conditions By Tiffany Dobbyn October 18, 2022 What…

[Deepfake videos are increasingly likely to cause viewers to overlook the role of technological manipulation in their media experience (i.e., experience presence), with dangerous consequences, but as this opinion piece from The Hill notes, shallowfakes – ”videos shared with misleading contexts or small edits” – pose a more immediate danger, and learning how to blunt their negative impacts will help prepare us to address the more sophisticated media manipulations to come. For much more information about this see a 90-minute video of a talk by the author on YouTube.  –Matthew] [Image: A woman in Washington, DC views a manipulated video…

[This story from Vice’s Motherboard reports on a political party in Denmark that is using artificial intelligence, personified by a (presence-evoking) chatbot called Leader Lars, to generate its policy platform. The idea goes beyond having a chatbot as a political candidate to allowing party members and others to shape the party’s platform by interacting with the AI. In addition to advocating political positions, a key goal is “raising more awareness about the role of AI in our lives and how governments can hold AI accountable to biases and other societal influences.” There are plans to expand the Party internationally. See…