There's Never Been a Worse Time to Be Authentic at Work Workers have been told to bring themselves to work, only to be disappointed time and time again, argues author Jodi-Ann Burey in her new book. Jodi-Ann Burey was only two weeks into her new role as an inclusion marketing manager for an outdoor retail company when she was accused of having a "race agenda." Burey, who is Black, was no stranger to workplace hypocrisy; as she sees it, the office is a petri dish where the knotty dynamics of society are concentrated. At the time of the accusation in February 2020, however, all she could do was laugh. "I was like, you knew who I was before you poached me. This is exactly what you wanted me to do," she says over Zoom.

At first it looked unbelievable, but Henry Kissinger had died. At 100 years old, news outlets--and the world--had been preparing for the passing of President Nixon's secretary of state for a while. Still, when people were finding out via emoji-filled chain texts, it seemed unreal. Deepfakes, the metaverse, Elon Musk telling advertisers to fuck themselves at a time when X could probably use the money. Perhaps this is why there is a premium on genuineness these days.

Researchers from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) have developed a method to increase the authenticity of low-cost, projection-based augmented reality installations, through special glasses that cause projected 3D images to go in and out of focus in the same way that they would if the objects were real, overcoming a critical perceptual hurdle for practical usage of projection systems in controlled environments. The IEEE system recreates depth planes for projected real and CGI imagery that will be superimposed into rooms. In this case, three CGI Stanford bunnies are being superimposed at the same depth plane as three real world objects, and their blurriness is controlled by where the viewer is looking and focusing. The system uses electrically focus-tunable lenses (ETL) embedded into the viewer's glasses (which are in any case necessary to separate the two image streams into a convincing, integrated 3D experience), and which communicate with the projection system, which then automatically changes the level of blurriness of the projected image seen by the viewer. The ETL lenses report back information about the user's focal attention and sets the level of blurriness on a per-plane basis for the rendering of the projected geometry.