Positive Technology Journal

From Wired

FROM THE PRESENCE-L LISTSERV:

From The East Valley (Arizona) Tribune

Tempe company has vision of future

By Ed Taylor, Tribune

Vincent F. Sollitto Jr. can’t be accused of lacking vision. The president and chief executive officer of Brillian Corp., a Tempe- based developer of high-definition televisions, sees a world in which millions of kids will play video games with sleek headsets that immerse them in a virtual reality world of their choosing — displaying bright, full-color, three-dimensional, high resolution scenes.

Best of all, the wireless headsets can be taken just about anywhere.

"This has medical and military applications, but gaming is the big market," Sollitto said. "Some day we’ll be producing millions of units a month. The kids are the real target."

Such technology is already here, but Brillian is trying to expand the market with an improved second-generation headset.

Brillian displayed a second generation prototype head-mounted display for video applications at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month in Las Vegas. The company is looking for partners that want to use the Brillian developed technology to bring their own head-mounted displays to the consumer market.

Already the company’s near-to-eye display technology is being used in headsets sold by i-O Display Systems and Shimadzu Corp.

The new second-generation version is intended to be leased to original equipment manufacturers that would put their own brand name on the product and bring it to the market quickly without having to design all of the technology pieces themselves, said Rainer Kuhn, vice president of sales and product marketing.

The headsets can plug into television sets, computers, DVD players, portable video recorders or game consoles. Another possibility is attaching them to mobile phones that can receive streaming video, providing an alternative to the tiny viewing screens on most cell phones. Miniature earphones can be attached to the headsets to provide audio.

The headset runs on a battery that provides 2 1 /2 to three hours of viewing. When combined with a player that also runs on batteries, consumers can take their programs wherever they want.

"Imagine sitting on an airplane and watching a movie privately at your seat," said Hope Frank, Brillian’s vice president of marketing.

The device demonstrated at the electronics show displays text, graphics, full motion video and 3-D content. The picture is equivalent to viewing a 42-inch diagonal television set from about
6 feet away, the company said.

Brillian makes the tiny microdisplay chips that go inside the headset at its Tempe headquarters, 1600 N. Desert Drive. The company also designed the electronics and optics for the system but outsources the manufacturing.

The design of the headsets will be key to making the product commercially successful, Frank said. The company has partnered with Ideo, an industrial design firm based in Palo Alto, Calif., to help.

"It’s not just the picture inside. It has to have the right weight and form factor," she said.

The prototype weighs about 4 ounces, making it lighter than displays currently on the market. Also it can fit over eyeglasses and has an adjustable headband for a comfortable fit.

"We think it’s not if, but when the market will take off with this,"
said Kuhn, adding that the second-generation technology could be available to consumers by the end of this year.

FROM THE PRESENCE-L LISTSERV:

From InformIT.com

Haptics: The Technology of Simulating Human Touch

Date: Jan 14, 2005
By Laurie Rowell.

When haptics research — that is, the technology of touch — moves from theory into hardware and software, it concentrates on two areas: tactile human-computer interfaces and devices that can mimic human physical touch. In both cases, that means focusing on artificial hands. Here you can delve into futuristic projects on simulating touch.


At a lunch table some time back, I listened to several of my colleagues eagerly describing the robots that would make their lives easier. Typical was the servo arm mounted on a sliding rod in the laundry room. It plucked dirty clothes from the hamper one at a time. Using information from the bar code—which new laws would insist be sewn into every label—the waldo would sort these items into a top, middle, or lower nylon sack.

As soon as a sack was full of, say, permanent press or delicates, the hand would tip the contents into the washing machine. In this way, garments could be shepherded through the entire cycle until the shirts were hung on a nearby rack, socks were matched and pulled together, and pajamas were patted smooth and stacked on the counter.

Sounds like a great idea, right? I mean, how hard could be for a robotic hand to feel its way around a collar until it connects with a label? As it turns out, that's pretty tricky. In fact, one of the things that keeps us from those robotic servants that we feel sure are our due and virtual reality that lets us ski without risking a broken leg is our limited knowledge of touch.

We understand quite a bit about how humans see and hear, and much of that information has been tested and refined by our interaction with computers over the past several years. But if we are going to get VR that really lets us practice our parasailing, the reality that we know has to be mapped and synthesized and presented to our touch so that it is effectively "fooled." And if we want androids that can sort the laundry, they have to be able to mimic the human tactile interface.

That leads us to the study of haptics, the technology of touch.

Research that explores the tactile intersection of humans and computers can be pretty theoretical, particularly when it veers into the realm of psychophysics. Psychophysics is the branch of experimental psychology that deals with the physical environment and the reactive perception of that environment.
Researchers in the field try, through experimentation, to determine parameters such as sensory thresholds for signal perception, to determine perceptual boundaries.

But once haptics research moves from theory into hardware and software, it concentrates on two primary areas of endeavor:
tactile human-computer interfaces and devices that can mimic human physical touch, most specifically and most commonly artificial hands.

Substitute Hands

A lot of information can be conveyed by the human hand.
Watching The Quiet Man the other night, I was struck by the scene in which the priest, played by Ward Bond, insists that Victor M shake hands with John Wayne. Angrily, M complies, but clearly the pressure he exerts far exceeds the requirements of the gesture. Both men are visibly "not wincing" as the Duke drawls, "I never could stand a flabby handshake myself."

When they release and back away from each other, the audience is left flexing its collective fingers in response.

In this particular exchange, complex social messages are presented to audience members, who recognize the indicators of pressure, position, and grip without being involved in the tactile cycle. Expecting mechanical hands to do all that ours can is a tall order, so researchers have been inching that way for a long time by making them do just some of the things ours can.

Teleoperators, for example, are distance-controlled robotic arms and hands that were first built to touch things too hot for humans to handle—specifically, radioactive substances in the Manhattan Project in the 1950s.

While operators had to be protected from radiation by a protective wall, the radioactive material itself had to be shaped with careful precision. A remote-controlled servo arm seemed like the perfect solution.

Accordingly, two identical mechanical arms were stationed on either side of a 1m-thick quartz window. The joints of one were connected to the joints of the other by means of pulleys and steel ribbons. In other words, whatever an operator made the arm do on one side of the barrier was echoed by the device on the other side.

These were effective and useful instruments, allowing the operator to move toxic substances from a remote location, but they were "dumb." They offered no electronic control and were not linked to a computer.

Modern researchers working on this problem would be concentrating now on devices that could "feel" the density, shape, and character of the materials that were perhaps miles away, seen only on a computer screen. This kind of teleoperator depends on a haptic interface and requires some understanding of how touch works.

Worlds in Your Hand

To build a mechanical eye—say, a camera—you need to study optics. To build a receiver, you need to understand acoustics and how these work with the human ear. Similarly, if you expect to build an artificial hand—or even a finger that perceives tactile sensation—you need to understand skin biomechanics.

At the MIT Touch Lab, where numerous projects in the realm of haptics are running at any given time, one project seeks to mimic the skin sensitivity of the primate fingertip as closely as possible, concentrating on having it react to touch as the human finger would.

The research is painstaking and exacting, involving, for example, precise friction and compressibility measurements of the fingerpads of human subjects. Fingertip dents and bends in response to edges, corners, and surfaces have provided additional data. At the same time, magnetic resonance imaging
(MRI) and high-frequency ultrasound show how skin behaves in response to these stimuli on the physical plane.

Not satisfied with the close-ups that they could get from available devices, the team developed a new tool, the Ultrasound Backscatter Microscope (UBM), which shows the papillary ridges of the fingertip and the layers of skin underneath in far greater detail than an MRI.

As researchers test reactions to surfaces from human and monkey participants, the data they gather is mapped and recorded to emerging 2D and 3D fingertip models. At this MIT project and elsewhere, human and robot tactile sensing is simulated by means of an array of mechanosensors presented in some medium that can be pushed, pressed, or bent.

In the Realm of Illusion

Touch might well be the most basic of human senses, its complex messages easily understood and analyzed even by the crib and pacifier set. But what sets it apart from other senses is its dual communication conduit, allowing us to send information by the same route through which we perceive it. In other words, those same fingers that acknowledge your receipt of a handshake send data on their own.

In one project a few years back, Peter J. Berkelman and Ralph L.
Hollis began stretching reality in all sorts of bizarre ways. Not only could humans using their device touch things that weren't there, but they could reach into a three-dimensional landscape and, guided by the images appearing on a computer screen, move those objects around.

This was all done with a device built at the lab based on Lorentz force magnetic levitation (Lorenz force is the force exerted on a charged particle in an electromagnetic field). The design depended upon a magnetic tool levitated or suspended over a surface by means of electromagnetic coils.

To understand the design of this maglev device, imagine a mixing bowl with a joystick bar in the middle. Now imagine that the knob of the joystick floats barely above the stick, with six degrees of freedom. Coils, magnet assemblies, and sensor assemblies fill the basin, while a rubber ring makes the top comfortable for a human operator to rest a wrist. This whole business is set in the top of a desk-high metal box that holds the power supplies, amplifiers, and control processors.

Looking at objects on a computer screen, a human being could take hold of the levitated tool and try to manipulate the objects as they were displayed. Force-feedback data from the tool itself provided tactile information for holding, turning, and moving the virtual objects.

What might not be obvious from this description is that this model offered a marvel of economy, replacing the bulk of previous systems with an input device that had only one moving part.
Holding the tool—or perhaps pushing at it with a finger—the operator could "feel" the cube seen on the computer screen:
edges, corners, ridges, and flat surfaces. With practice, operators could use the feedback data to maneuver a virtual peg into a virtual hole with unnerving reliability.

Notice something here: An operator could receive tactile impressions of a virtual object projected on a screen. In other words, our perception of reality was starting to be seriously messed around with here.

HUI, Not GUI

Some of the most interesting work in understanding touch has been done to compensate for hearing, visual, or tactile impairments.

At Stanford, the TalkingGlove was designed to support individuals with hearing limitations. It recognized American Sign Language finger spelling to generate text on a screen or synthesize speech. This device applied a neural-net algorithm to map the movement of the human hand to an instrumented glove to produce a digital output. It was so successful that it spawned a commercial application in the Virtex Cyberglove, which was later purchased by Immersion and became simply the Cyberglove.
Current uses include virtual reality biomechanics and animation.

At Lund University in Sweden, work is being done in providing haptic interfaces for those with impaired vision. Visually impaired computer users have long had access to Braille displays or devices that provide synthesized speech, but these just give text, not graphics, something that can be pretty frustrating for those working in a visual medium like the Web. Haptic interfaces offer an alternative, allowing the user to feel shapes and textures that could approximate a graphical user interface.

At Stanford, this took shape in the 1990s as the "Moose," an experimental haptic mouse that gave new meaning to the terms drag and drop, allowing the user to feel a pull to suggest one and then feel the sudden loss of mass to signify the other. As users approached the edge of a window, they could feel the groove; a check box repelled or attracted, depending on whether it was checked. Some of the time, experimental speech synthesizers were used to "read" the text.

Such research has led to subsequent development of commercial haptic devices, such as the Logitech iFeel Mouse, offering the promise of new avenues into virtual words for the visually impaired.

Where Is This Taking Us?

How is all this research doing toward getting us to virtual realities and actual robot design? Immersion and other companies offer a variety of VR gadgets emerging from the study of haptics, but genuine simulated humans are pretty far out on the horizons.
What we have is a number of researchers around the globe working on perfecting robotic hands, trying to make them not only hold things securely, but also send and receive messages as our own do. Here is a representative sampling:

The BarrettHand
[]
BH8-262: Originally developed by Barrett Technology for NASA but now available commercially, it offers a three-fingered grasper with four degrees of freedom, embedded intelligence, and the ability to hold on to any geometric shape from any angle.

The Anatomically Correct Testbed (ACT) Hand
[]: A project at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute, this is an ambitious effort to create a synthetic human hand for several purposes. These include having the hand function as a teleoperator or prosthetic, as an investigative tool for examining complex neural control of human hand movement, and as a model for surgeons working on damaged human hands. Still in its early stages, the project has created an actuated index finger that mimics human muscle behavior.

Cyberhand []: This collaboration of researchers and developers from Italy, Spain, Germany, and Denmark proposes to create a prosthetic hand that connects to remaining nerve tissue. It will use one set of electrodes to record and translate motor signals from the brain, and a second to pick up and conduct sensory signals from the artificial hand to nerves of the arm for transport through regular channels to the brain.

Research does not produce the products we'll be seeing in common use during the next few years. It produces their predecessors. But many of the scientists in these labs later create marketable devices. Keep an eye on these guys; they are the ones responsible for the world we'll be living in, the one with bionic replacement parts, robotic housekeepers, and gym equipment that will let us fly through virtual skies.

Experience Design And the Design of Experience

by Erik Davis

This piece appeard in Arcadia: Writings on Theology and Technology (Australia, 2001)


There is no creation ex nihilo. We always work from pre-existing material, both literal substances (wood, a language, the resonance of strings and reeds) and the existing cultural organization of those materials within history, tradition, and contemporary networks of influence. So as we survey the expanding and converging landscape of electronic, virtual, and immersive production, we might ask ourselves: what material is being worked here? Is it simply new organizations of photons, sound waves, and haptic cues? Or does the "holistic" fusion of different media and the construction of more immersive technologies actually suggest another, perhaps more fundamental material?

I’d wager that the new material is indeed rather fundamental: human experience itself. Of course, "human experience" is a vague and historically loaded concept, and a thorough hashing out of the term would require, at the very least, lengthy excursions into Jamesian pragmatism, psychobiology, and Buddhist phenomenology. But for the moment let’s just think of human experience as the phenomenal unfolding of awareness in real time, a movement which tugs against the network of concepts and significations while tending toward the condition of more direct sensation or intuitive perception. In other words, experience may not be able to escape the prisonhouse of language, but it willingly sticks its nose out the barred window and inhales.

Many semiotic and structuralist arguments suggest that we are creatures of language, that nothing, either sensations or intuitions, escapes the domain of signs. But one can just as easily argue that everything that arises in consciousness is experience — that memory, analysis, and reflection all arise in the phenomenal stream, the loops and twists, of James’ "stream of consciousness." As a compromise between these two positions, imagine that you possess an analog Consciousness slider that runs from the nearly totally linguistic on one side to the pure intensities of sensation on the other. While avoiding a strict divide, your thought gizmo allows you to make a gradual though clear distinction between meaning and sensation.

Take the example of a rollercoaster. Obviously roller-coasters exist within a network of symbolic associations. But the act of subjectively submitting your bodymind to a rollercoaster ride, and undergoing the resulting thrills of adrenaline, fear, and gut-fluttering sensation, cannot be directly assimilated to the network of significations that constitute the meaning of rollercoasters. The same point can be made about recreational drugs. Obviously the drug experience is mediated by culture, by expectations, rituals, and social stories about the meaning and value of certain compounds. But we are sticking our heads in the sand if we insist that the evident physiological changes induced by drugs do not correspond with real psychological changes, not only in the content of subjective experience (its images, pleasure fluxes and meanings), but in the more fundamental cognitive parameters which structure experience in the first place.

At the same time, these non-semiotic elements of experience can also function as passageways to new regimes of signs. Fans of psychedelics often find themselves plunging into incoherent or abstract deformations of perception and sensation, only to "break through" into very strange, but nonetheless solid and coherent, worlds of meaning. Immersive works of art or entertainment are also rarely content to simply produce a new range of sensations. Instead, they often function as portals into "other worlds." Following a similar development, the rollercoaster grows into themed adventure rides like Universal Studio’s Back to the Future attraction. These other worlds, of course, are composed of the same sorts of signs that make up our shared human construct — indeed, they often detach those signs from conventional reality, recombining or morphing them within the more malleable zone of the virtual. But in order to successfully boot up these new semiotic universes within a users’ consciousness, the media technology must directly engage the machinery of human perception (proprioception, 3d audio, etc) on a "subliminal" level. In other words, immersive worlds are constructed on a platform of rejiggered experience.

And so we enter the era of what I’m calling Experience Design. A quick scan of our sociocultural landscape suggests that, in terms of artistic practices, mass entertainment, sports, and emerging technologies of pleasure, productive forces are increasingly targeting experience itself — that evanescent flux of sensation and perception that is, in some sense, all we have and all we are.

Let’s begin with the rise of the so-called "experience economy." On one level, this describes an apparent shift within the consumption patters of the younger, more technologically savvy elite, a shift away from the hoarding of material goods and status symbols to the hoarding of novel, exciting, and challenging experiences. (Dennis Tito’s 20 million-dollar space holiday on MIR is the paragon here). The experience economy of the super-rich also dovetails with broader cultural trends, including the dramatic intensification of tourism over the last few decades — a process which offers us increasingly specialized, adventurous, and exotic packages (guzzling ayahuasca with Peruvian shamans, caving in Belize, visiting real live monks in Bhutan). We have also seen a heightened interest in technologically-mediated outdoor activities like rock climbing or wind surfing, along with the rise of "extreme sports," which have little to do with sports as contest and much to do with the production of subjective intensity. The extreme example here is the Bungie jump, which requires neither skill nor exertion beyond the passive willingness to undergo the death-defying neurotransmitter and adrenaline rush that hits the nervous system.

The turn towards increasingly raw experience also marks a number of developments within media and entertainment, including the often-remarked descent to the lowest common denominator of sex, violence and the gross-out stunts of MTV’s Jackass ("Don’t try this at home!"). Over the last ten or fifteen years we have also seen the rise of a new kind of film, one which features amazing special effects, but which otherwise sucks. Whether or not we judge such films to be good, or even worthwhile, depends on how much we accept the new regime of special effects as a semi-autonomous component of cinema whose art is largely devoted to stimulating immediate sensations and visceral — rather than symbolic or narrative — emotion. A similar logic comes to the fore in many computer games and mass applications of virtual reality technologies in amusement parks and arcades, all of which strive for the quality of "immersion" — which is often just another word for simulated experience. Meanwhile, the language of "experience" has become thoroughly integrated into multimedia design, even in the relatively low-bandwidth tricks and offerings that commercial websites use to capture sticky eyeballs.

***

In the musical sphere, we can see a similar shift in the rise of raves, where intense lights, sounds, and projection screens combine to create a visceral, often collective experience of intensity and atmosphere. These effects (and affects) differ markedly from the more traditional identifications available through even the most Dionysian rock concerts. Another crucial ingredient to the rave experience is drugs. As Simon Reynolds has argued, many elements of electronic dance music, including non-sonic elements like light sticks and Vicks Vap-o-rub inhalers, emerged because of the particular effects they produce in a suitably tweaked mind. In fact, psychoactive drugs are in some ways the ultimate "technology of experience," and establish a basic model for Experience Design. The rapid advances in psycho-pharmacology, both corporate and underground, have given rise to a flood of consciousness-modifying substances which promise to both suppress unwanted dimensions of human experience (depression, anxiety) and open up novel spaces of perceptual and cognitive effects to immediate exploration.

Obviously, a startlingly broad range of phenomena can be placed under the umbrella of Experience Design, and such breadth is often suspicious. But despite a number of crucial problems that are overlooked in this acute generalization, it seems crucial to recognize and emphasize the continuity, rather than the divergence, between contemporary practices that target the human sensorium. Across the fields of art, architecture, media, music, pharmacology, even spirituality, we are moving towards the intentional and multi-dimensional stimulation and production of a complex range of increasingly immediate human responses, including the direct induction of classic "altered states of consciousness." These responses extend far beyond (and below) the traditional object of communication: the conscious human subject conceived as a rational agent and a reader of meanings. In other words, as science, pharmacology, and media technology deepen their understanding of how the human nervous system joins with the ever mercurial psyche to produce a lived sense of reality, these knowledges are becoming integrated into the engines of cultural production. To put it crudely, our cultural technologies are becoming less like books and songs, and more like rollercoasters or drugs.

Media art, with its connections to both alternative culture and critical theory, is curiously arrayed when it comes to Experience Design. On the one hand, its theoretical savvy frees it from the traditional notion of the subject as an autonomous agent of meaning, while also increasing the willingness to play with the construction of subjectivity. Yet many artists, writers and theorists remain queasy about the more technoscientific knowledges and practices involved in understanding and producing human subjectivity within the increasingly technical domain of psychology. This reflexively critical response to technoscientific discourses is mirrored in a similarly pervasive set of responses to spiritual or ritual discourses, which also fundamentally engage experience and the production of altered states of consciousness. While artists are becoming more overtly concerned with bioscience and spirituality alike, both of these flinches continue to result in art which stresses critical distance over the direct mobilization of effects and novel zones of becoming. This distance is valuable, but insufficient. However legitimate, skepticism and distrust of hard psychology, neural science, and psychobiology should not cut the (post)humanistic world off from direct engagement with the proliferating technologies of subjectivity.

For one thing, many other sectors of society are perfectly happy to employ these same tools to far more chilling ends. Advertising and marketing are only the most obvious examples on what I would call the right wing of Experience Design. ("Black magic" would perhaps be a more appropriate term, but I will leave the occult dimension of Experience Design aside for now). Here the target is often demonstrably irrational: an instinctive, un-self-aware subject whose inchoate fears and desires are organized around commodities or institutions. Though one must always beware of excessive fears over "subliminal" advertising, mallrats with sensitive noses will also recognize the pine and spice scents pumped into malls around Christmas time. Some slot machines are now equipped with high-tech smell emitters because certain scents have proven to keep individuals at the machines longer. Whether or not these cues are culturally determined is beside the point. What’s important is that at the moment, these stimulants aim for a technical zone of influence below "propaganda," which is still linked explicitly to a field of meanings. Instead they directly attack the limbic system, drawing the subject into a deeper, more immersive activity. As the West embarks on a Shadow War against terrorism, the tools of propaganda and psychic management alike can only proliferate.

***

By embracing the tools of Experience Design, media artists have and can continue to critique our expanding technosphere while also probing its capacity for beauty, pleasure, and novel perceptions -- even wisdom. Artists are uniquely placed to interrogate the production of technological experience, and to question the dominant experiences which are being engineered and renormalized by massive commercial engines of subjectivity. But this critical function must be coupled with experiment, with the willingness to creatively participate in the larger cultural process of re-engineering subjectivity, of pushing the envelope of experience. This is not necessarily a matter of becoming high tech -- relatively low-tech artists like Gary Hill and Bill Viola have made great strides in this direction. But it is a matter of directly engaging, not simply the new technologies, but the underlying technical "material" of subjectivity itself.

Finally, I believe this turn towards experience, in art and technology, is related to the growing embrace of the discourses and practices of spirituality. Whether or not it is defined or encountered within the context of faith traditions or not, "spirituality" largely emphasizes the use of subtle "psychological" techniques and practices to open up and transform our existential, personal, subjective encounter with the world and the self. At its best, the global turn towards meditation, yoga, healing prayer, trance dancing, and practices of loving-kindness reflects a search for a higher tone of experience itself, not a hunger for new consoling beliefs. The secular spirituality of self-help books, brain machines, and leadership seminars can also be seen as a species of "Experience Design" in that it emphasizes changing, or reprogramming, your direct experience of your self in the world. However, here the underlying intentions — which in some sense make or break spiritual aspiration — often leave much to be desired.

Media artists are uniquely placed to explore this emerging world of spirituality without falling into the dogmatic or New Age traps that swallow up so many true believers. Altered states of consciousness are real, and as our media technologies get better at drawing us in and out of them, artists and other non-coercive proponents of the human spirit (or whatever you want to call it) need to become familiar with these states, not simply as a source of inspiration, but as modes of expression, communication, and confrontation itself. By recognizing that the material that we are now focused on is not technology but human experience itself, then we take a step closer to that strange plateau where our inner lives unfold into an almost collective surface of shared sensation and reframed perception — a surface on which we may feel exposed and vulnerable, but beginning to awake.

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From WIRED

Presence Research in Europe: Economic and Social
Prospects


PREP 05

March 17 - 18, 2005
Hanover, Germany

Virtual and Augmented Reality applications diffuse into more and
more realms of business, research, and every day life. To make
people feel "present" in mediated environments is the goal of
many new technologies. But do we exploit the capacities of those
"Presence" technologies to full extent? What do the R & D
departments know that has not been adopted in applied
contexts? What do businesses and governments expect from
future VR and AR research? PREP 05 is the forum to discuss
these questions at a European level.

PREP 05 brings together leading researchers, industry
representatives and policy makers who are working on
development, applications and knowledge dissemination in the
domain of Presence. The concept of Presence is one of the
major research topics in the VR and AR communities, and the
European Commission is very actively supporting international
projects on Presence. PREP 05 is the 6th biannual gathering of
those projects, which are organized under the "Future Emerging
Technologies" Section of the Directorate General "Information
Society".

PREP 05 addresses the visions of how to use "Presence"
technologies for commercial success and the public good.
Reflecting the broad range of domains in which Presence is of
major relevance, PREP 05 will feature expert presentations on
VR-based business communication, tele-medicine, e-learning,
and entertainment. Moreover, invited speakers will introduce
European political visions on the economic and social prospects
of Presence research.

Experts from media technology corporations, e-government
projects, applied research centers, academic institutions, and
organizations who actually use VR / AR systems are invited to
join PREP 05, to share their ideas on the future of the field, and
to learn about the visions of leading experts in the field. PREP 05
will take place immediately after CeBIT, the world's leading IT
exhibition, and provides an excellent environment for networking
and exchange of ideas.

We cordially invite you to join us for PREP 2005 and contribute
your expertise and visions to the fields of VR, AR, and
"Presence" technologies.

For further information, please visit www.prep2005.info
<http://www.prep2005.info/> .


Conference Chair

Professor Peter Vorderer, Ph. D.
Annenberg School for Communication
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, USA

For a presentation of outstanding research quality

at the CyberTherapy 2005 conference

The aim of this prize is to reward the presentation of strong methodological
studies at the Cybertherapy conference. The recipient has to be a researcher
who is new to the field of cyberpsychology. It is open to both oral or poster
presentations and to researchers from all countries and disciplines.

For more information about the CyberTherapy conference and deadlines for
posters and oral presentations, see
http://www.interactivemediainstitute.com/conference2005.org/index.htm .

The award is delivered by Stéphane Bouchard, chairholder of the Canada
Research Chair in Clinical Cyberpsychology. It includes a certificate and a
check of 1 000 $ US.


Rules of attributions:

The first criterion to assess the submissions is the scientific merit of the
study. Rigorous designs, reliable measurements, adequate sample sizes,
appropriate statistical analyses and strong control conditions are all
significant assets. The scientific quality of the content of the presentation
will also contribute (i.e., clear and replicable descriptions of the
methodology), but not the graphic quality of the presentation (e.g., nice
images or videos).

The recipient must be the first author of the presentation, have the oral /
poster accepted for the conference, submit the presentation in time for the
award, pay the registration dues and personally attend to the conference. His
or her intellectual contribution must be significant (e.g., not the main
results of a funded study planned and conducted by a senior researcher in the
field but presented at the conference by a student). In case of doubt, please
explain the situation in writing when submitting your presentation to the
award.

A new investigator in the field is defined by meeting one the criteria below.
The applicant must stated in writing which criteria are met when sending the
submission:

- currently a university student;

- currently a post-doc researcher;

- currently an autonomous researcher but not having published as first
author more than five peer-reviewed papers on VR or cyberpsychology since the
end of the Ph.D. or the post-doc;

- currently an autonomous researcher but not having received more than
two major research grants on VR or cyberpsychology.

The content of the presentation must be submitted no later than two weeks
ahead of the conference to stephane.bouchard@uqo.ca
. Evaluation of the submissions will be
conducted during the days prior to the conference, based only on this
document. The recipient will be informed publicly during the conference.

All reviews will be made by Stéphane Bouchard, excepted for presentations
involving collaborators to the Chair (e.g., students, co-investigators). The
best submissions will be selected and ranked-ordered by Stéphane Bouchard
according to their scientific merit. Submission from collaborators to the
Chair will be reviewed by an independent reviewer (this year, Brenda
Wiederhold), compared to those rank-ordered and placed accordingly in the
ranks. To maximise impartiality, the decision of the independent reviewer will
be final.

If you have any question about this award, please contact Stéphane Bouchard by
e-mail or by phone (819-595-3900-ext. 2360).

The creation of this award is made possible by a Canada Research Chair (CRC)
grant (www.chairs.gc.ca ) awarded to Stéphane
Bouchard for the CRC in Clinical Cyberpsychology. It is not awarded by the CRC
program or by the Cybertherapy organisation committee.