Presence: An Introduction ((Or an attempt at a grand-unification for AR, VR, Holograms, Sound Installations, Visiting a Museum, and, yes, even Penguins))

Lightning Talk
Michael Haley Goldman, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, USA

With the hype and drama once again circling around Virtual Reality and all of its related flavors, any Tech oriented division of a Museum that has not yet been asked to do something with VR should receive the call in the next fifteen minutes. I’ll wait while you check your voicemail. But even with the Gray Lady sending out Google Cardboard as the crackerjack surprise in every Sunday Edition and the fabled Oculus Rift really, finally this time actually launching ((sometime between submitting this presentation and actually giving it – maybe)), how are we overburdened museum specialists supposed to make sense of, develop for, and communicate to staff what this miraculous virtually real future means?

Bibliography:
References are starting with Cummings and Bailenson’s - How immersive is enough? A meta-analysis of the effect of immersive technology on user presence - and the work of the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab but for a ‘Lightning Talk’ I am trying to keep the references to a minimum.