Is the term "Presence" dead?

Dear Colleagues,

Sorry that I could not be at the meeting, since I had simultaneously
two other conferences in Barcelona that I was speaking at.

I wonder if the topic of "presence" is now dead.

The reason is that it has a different definition by everyone who uses
it. This is fine of course, but then there is no field of research or
rather many different disparate fields of research.

Another reason why it may be dead is that it seems that many people
wish to move it way beyond its original origins in terms of
telepresence to include basically everything, mobile phones, internet
chat, and why not faxes too? Again this is fine people can study
whatever they like, but it means that there is no field of presence,
since it is everything. To paraphrase Hegel, everything is nothing and
nothing is everything.

I have heard that people are saying that the definition that we use in
PRESENCCIA excludes psychology. This is a very strange idea. First, as
the definition says we consider "response" at every observable or
reportable level. Is "psychological response" to be excluded? And of
course the other side is to understand the reasons and conditions of
why and under what conditions people act as they do within a virtual
environment. Is this not to include individual differences and
psychological reasons? Are the partners within PRESENCCIA who are
psychologists to be excluded from the project? Adopt a definition or
not, but don't say incorrect things about it.

I like to study how people behave and feel and think within a virtual
reality. I like to ask the question about how much their responses to
the virtual are similar to the physical (i.e., is their behaviour,
response, emotions, thoughts, realistic given the portrayed
circumstances?). It is very interesting to find that sometimes one set
of responses (eg, what they report about their experiences through
questionnaires or interviews) and some other set of responses (eg,
their physiological responses) do not tell the same story - why not?
On the other hand sometimes all the assessed responses do tell the
same story (they report "being there" and their behavioural,
emotional, psychological, etc responses match with that). I choose to
call this a study of "presence", and high presence is when all the
markers tell the same story, all point in the same direction. I would
like to find out why and under what circumstances this occurs. I think
that such a quest is scientific, and highly multidisciplinary (and
also useful, because it informs us about how to build systems and
applications that work). I think it accords well with the notion of
presence as it was derived from teleoperator systems and telepresence.
However, if every time anyone says the word "presence" there is a
discussion about true meanings, and if after all these years of
research we are still arguing about definitions, then the game is
lost. Of course I intend to continue doing the same research, but
maybe it is time to stop using the word "presence".

Finally I would add for those who may have raised this issue, as
co-editor-in-chief of the journal PRESENCE I do not enforce any
definition of "presence". (Anyway, the vast majority of papers are not
even about presence). In fact papers are reviewed by experts, the
editors-in-chief do not take significant part in the reviewing
process, but rather make policy.

In fact you may be interested to know that we have changed the
structure of PRESENCE reviewing so that there is now a set of
Associated Editors. When a paper comes in the editors-in-chief decide
which AE to send it to based on their particular expertise. The AEs
then read the paper to decide if it is suitable for PRESENCE at all,
and then assign it to 2 other reviewers for a detailed review. The AE
then summarises the situation and makes a recommendation to the
editors-in-chief, who have the final responsibility. In almost every
case the editors-in-chief would of course go along with the
recommendations of the AEs.

Our goal on the journal is reduce turn around time from the very long
waiting times that there have been to about 6 months from submission
to publication. Already review times have been drastically reduced
under the new system. Of course there is a backlog of papers waiting
to be published and until this is cleared there will not be a 6 months
turn around time. But it is coming. In the past EXTREMELY FEW
ordinarily submitted papers have been rejected from PRESENCE (the
exception being some Special Issues run by guest editors). Under the
new scheme the number of rejections may increase, since what we want
to avoid is marginal papers that go through multiple reviews year
after year and never actually get rejected or published, but just
waste the time of both the authors and reviewers. So there will be
quick rejection, or a paper gets sent out for review. How this
operates over time will depend on the AEs.

regards
Mel

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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.

Giulio
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