G. Riva et al: Presence meta: 3 or 4 balls?

Giuseppe Riva wrote
Dear Giulio,
I read with interest the content of the Summary Report from the Roadmap and I have some input to suggest:

a) The conclusion suggests more emphasis on Human Cognition but apparently neglect the role of Social Psychology and Social Presence in this area.

In my opinion, a first step towards the integration of the whole Psychology field in Presence research is a revision of the "Presence meta-disciplinary blocks" image that is used by the Peach Consortium.

I , with my colleagues Andrea Gaggioli and Fabrizia Mantovani, redesigned both it and the one with interdisciplinary overlaps that apparently misses some critical areas for Presence Research. We hope that our contribution will be helpful to the Peach Community.

b) The conclusion suggests more emphasis in content creation with the development of toolkits to simplify content creation.

I'm happy to announce to the Peach community that my lab recently released the NeuroVR software

http://www.neurovr.org

an open source virtual reality toolkit to allow the researcher to develop without any technical experience simple experiments based on pre-defined but customizable environments. Have a look at it, it is free.


Ciao

Giuseppe











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Dear All

as I could have said to some of you during the WinG session on March 8th, "Presence" holds a specific meaning for the specialists in Telecommunications and Computer Science.

If you go to Wikipedia and search for Presence, you will find the definition that I am more familiar with (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presence_information):
presence information is a status indicator that conveys ability and willingness of a potential communication partner - for example a user to communicate. A user's client provides presence information (presence state) via a network connection to a presence service, which is stored in what constitutes his personal availability record (called a presentity) and can be made available for distribution to other users (called watchers) to convey his availability for communication. Presence information has wide application in many communication services and is one of the innovations driving the popularity of instant messaging or recent implementations of voice over IP clients.

Besides there are important standard bodies in the Telecommunications and Computer Science, like IETF ( Internet Engineering Task Force) and OMA (Open Mobile Alliance) that have produced specifications for communication services that deal with this definition of Presence.
For instance see "A Model for Presence and Instant Messaging" from IETF (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2778.txt) or the "Presence and Availability Working Group" charter in OMA (http://www.openmobilealliance.org/tech/wg_committees/pag.html).

Talking from the Industry point of view, some of the companies which are working around Presence in the sense stated before, may be deceived by our definition.

In my opinion the suggestion made by Giuseppe to introduce Mediated Communication can help to avoid this possible confusion.

Kind regards
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Gianluca ZAFFIRO

Giulio, Crisitina, Giuseppe,
I don’t want to write to everyone on the list since I agree with much that Mel, Gianluca and others have mailed in response to this.
Just to say though that I agree with Giuseppe’s helpful extension of the PEACH diagram to include human communication and co-presence.
Whether we want to include in this other technologies like mobile phones or not, co-presence can fit into Mel’s picture that you experience a sense of ‘being there’, inside a virtual environment, with another person – and this, not single-user VR or VE systems – has become the most important area of research in my opinion. So I hope we can use this revised diagram.
All best wishes,
Ralph

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Hello,

Quick note from my side --- Joan will elaborate. This is my opinion as a researcher, mind you.

I don't think a new ball is needed, but I agree co-Presence and Presence should both be at the center of the story.

This may be due to my reductionist bias: I see social phenomena as an emergent phenomenon arising from the interaction of brains (as cognitive agents).

For me, the disciple/s of mediated communication should be in the center: mediated communication of multiple agents (human and machine). Co-Presence would be right at the intersection of Human Cognition and Human Machine Interfaces. Or even at the center (co-Presence).

One should consider communication and co-Presence in a world with both humans and intelligent avatars.

Kind regards, have a great weekend,

Giulio

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Hi again, Giulio,
I don’t mind reductionism at all, but with these systems, we are not just talking about agents or human-machine interaction, but also several humans interacting within virtual spaces (networked Caves, online games, linked VR headsets etc) – they have a strong experience of copresence, no matter what epistemological or other positions you take. In that case, you need the additional ball!
I’ve written a few things about these systems (one paper attached), but you will see many researchers concerned with these at the Presence 2007 conference,
Have a good weekend you too,
Ralph

Ralph Schroeder
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Dear Giulio,
saying that "social phenomena are emergent phenomena arising from the interaction of brains" does not reflect the work done by social psychology and social cognition in the last century.

We know very well that social phenomena are strongly influenced by both artefacts (including cultural ones) and language (including meaning), that in your definition are classified as "emergent phenomena".

Your definition wipes out the work done by many researchers in understanding how it is possible for a brain, to recognize another brain through language, media or virtual reality.

Have a look at the paper by Gamberini and Spagnolli "A situated, action based approach to Virtual Environments" for a detailed discussion of these issues:

http://www.emergingcommunication.com/volume5.html

It is crazy that, in the road map deliverable, Peach suggests a wider involvement of psychologists and then is not interested in considering them.

Further, doing it, you exclude the PASION project, one of the currently running FET Presence project, from the domain of Presence. And I do not think this is acceptable.

For PASION, the final goal is to create advanced communication tools allowing an easy recognition of the intentions of the agents (humans) in work or leisure settings. And for it Communication is a critical part of the co-presence experience.

Giuseppe

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Dear Giuseppe,

Thanks for your comments and let us keep the debate alive...

Anyhow, I don't really understand your statements on my definition wiping out psychology and sociology, or promoting a lack of interest in psychology in the roadmap. The discovery of the atom did not kill chemistry...or biology. Quite the contrary. [although it did kill alchemy once and for all...]

[you may notice at this point my training as a physicist...]

What I was pointing out is that Mediated Communication is itself a consequence of Human-Machine Interaction, and that, in my opinion, the intersection of the roadmap ball "Human Cognition and Behavior" with "Human-Machine Interaction/Interfaces" automatically includes mediated communication phenomena.

I like to keep things simple, that is all. But, as I mentioned, this is just my opinion as a researcher, and the roadmap is to be shaped by the (active) community.

With regards to your comment on Pasion, I also think the focus of Presence should have a strong VR dimension. Perhaps Mel is right and we should call Presence VR-Presence, or Hyper-Presence .... or something like that.

Kind regards,

Giulio
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Dear Giulio,
telling that Mediated Communication is itself a
consequence of Human-Machine Interaction is not acceptable for any scholar working in Media research.

Communication and in particular Mediated Communication (for instance writing) was born much before than Human-Machine Interaction.

The first alphabetic writing appeared around 2000 BC. Instead, the first Human-Machine Interaction appeared in the last century (some pre-robots appeared in China at around 1000/1100).

For a physician like you, the cause-effect direction is a critical issue for explaining reality. So, I do not understand why do you want to reverse it. ;-)

Ciao

Giuseppe
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Giuseppe, Giulio, Cristina, Mel,
Just to say I agree with Giuseppe - but this does not have to rely on an
argument about media research or writing.
It is simply that in many ways the most interesting VR/VE systems are those
where several people are present - and where this copresence is *caused* by
the interaction between people (even if they are in avatar form), not
because of human-machine interaction.
Best,
Ralph
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Dear all,
I would like to propose something in order to equilibrate all the different sensibilities and disciplines around the "balls schema" I presented at Helsinki.
I think you all have in mind this 3 balls schema, don't you?


I remember that Giuseppe Riva said at the landscape workshop in the last consultation meeting,
that the right ball was for Technology, but this was a little bit more subtile, it was for "Machine Cognition and Behaviour", thinking of Computational Intelligence and similar things.

On the other side, on the left side, we had "Human Cognition and Behaviour".
In Behaviour, even if it has this horrible behaviourist connotation, we include social and linguistic behaviour.
The intersection of the 2 "Cognition and Behaviour" balls, when there was no intersection with the 3rd upper ball, gives things like computational linguistics, which is abstract enough to "forget", or take as granted, concerns about audio/visual/haptic/whatever interfaces.

What I'd like to propose is to change the upper ball: instead of Human Computer Interaction, we could put something like Technology Mediation, which would include all interfaces for communication, as well between humans (so, Computer Mediated Communication) than between humans and machines (so, Human Computer Interfaces).
(Following Giuseppes example, Technology Mediation would be like to put a pencil in an everyday "primitive" non-mediated interaction in order to invent the ideographic writing, with the pencil being the Technology)


I really think that it's not practical to separate those 2 disciplines (CMC and HCI) at the extremes of a global schema, as in the schema Giuseppe proposed.
This complexifies a lot the general description, so it gets harder to understand, and I think that the general idea should be to develop collaborative environments in which people and "not so stupid" machines can collaborate, developing interaction that is "natural" in terms of social and linguistic behaviour of the humans.

As I understand it, this last framework would blur a little bit that idea of separation of (socio-)Presence separated from (tele-)Presence.


Now, as we are in different aproaches and disciplines around Presence research, would this suitable for all?

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As the last point,
I would like to stress that apart from the "Research balls" we should focus our attention towards the "Applications balls". Here, we have 3 aspects: Art, Industry and Health, with complicated interrelation between them. We didn't have time to adress those issues in the first deliverable of the Roadmap, but we can't avoid doing it for the second deliverable.


A third issue, perhaps for a further iteration, would be the interrelation between Ethics, Legal and Education in this roadmap. Same idea: complicated interrelations should be analyzed between them.

This would allow at the end to analyze the relations between 3 main areas: Research, Applications, and Social Implications of those applications (I hope lawyers don't mind if they are included in a term like "Social implications"...). The Social implications would then influence the directions of Research, and so on.

For me, it's the simplest schema I can find for a document that has to take in account so many aspects and adress so many topics. If someone thinks that he has one better, please tell me. I will be happy to change the roadmap structure to fit into that.

Best Regards,
Joan Llobera
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Dear Joan,

This is fine by me.

I agree Human Computer Interaction is too restrictive anyhow (Human Machine Interaction or Technology Mediation is more to the point). In fact, Technology Mediation allows for computer-computer interaction, which is also needed to encompass interaction between both human and machine agent communities.

Kind regards,

Giulio
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Dear Joan,
it is fine for me, too.

Giuseppe