More on communication and Presence

Joan,
I sent the email in italics to several people in response to Giuseppe’s idea of media and causality – and this also applies to your idea about technology mediation:

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.

So again, so long as your ideas about presence and copresence include human-human copresence, not just technology mediation (as you said in your email) – which requires a fourth ball – that is OK with me.
Thanks,
Ralph
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Dear Ralph,
I understand that co-presence, as part of "general" presence research, is -at least in first very general description-, the crossing of "human cognition and behaviour", including social and linguistic behaviour, and "technology mediation",
understanding technology mediation in whatever level of immersion this mediation is done, and including as well for Computer Mediated Interaction than Human Computer Interaction (let's say, 2 not completely unrelated macrodisciplines inside Technology Mediation).

I understand this is generic enough to have everyone in the Presence IPs represented, and it allows to keep the description on 3 very general aspects interacting (the 2 I commented and artificial or "synthetic" cognition and behaviour).
I understand that this doesn't need to be described with 4 balls, which makes complicate to understand what the "diagram" depicts, and we want it to be understandable as a first requirement.

Giuseppe agrees on that, and I think it is not unreasonable and generic enough.
From my side, I just followed Giuseppe's example and arguments for clarity,
and to show that I understood what he was talking about.


Now,
we can continue discussing the names we put on every thing as it is essentially putting names to things we already know what we are talking about, but I would like to focus on applications, which can provide more light to the general picture of Presence research, even to the research diagram we are discussing at present, and there is a lot of work to do around that.
And perhaps this will bring more light to this debate around if presence is more socio-presence or presence is more tele-presence.

Even more, the depiction of applications will help to analyze the Social Implications of all this research.
But that is only mi opinion, of course... Please let me know this is reasonable, or if you think I'm excluding something.

Best Regards,
Joan Llobera
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Dear Joan, Ralf and all,
it is clear that for a psychologist, the interaction with another man - both mediated by technology or not - and in particular the communication activities are critical for the development and expression of cognitive abilities.

Recent studies show clearly that communication and cognition are strictly related: there is no cognition without communication. When communication is impaired, cognition is limited.

Removing from the picture the communication process will deny the role that communication has in defining and developing cognitive abilities. And this is what Ralph underlines in his message: if presence is a cognitive process, and communication influences cognitive processes, removing it does not help us in understanding presence and co-presence. In fact, co-presence is *caused* by the interaction with people...

However, I agree that at this stage the change from "Human-computer interaction" to "Technology Mediation" is a first important step towards a vision that matches both the needs of technicians and the ones of psychologists.

Giuseppe
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Hi, yes, it is all true. But what is the difference between presence research and ....

social psychology
sociology
the study of consciousness
neuroscience
communications
multi-media
etc.
etc.

Ralph's note would be I think more or less the same had he been talking about the meaning of "social psychology".

it is defined so broadly as to be everything.

Unless it has some form of restriction, ie, it is not about communication in general, it is not about social processes in general, not about psychology in general, then it is about everything, and then there is no special topic of presence research.

Also the answer is not simply that it is "mediated". Again almost everything is mediated!

regards
Mel
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Mel and others,
presence research is limited to those systems in which there is a sensory experience of being in a place/space other than the one your physically in - and being able to interact with it. In short, ‘being there’. This is consistent with Mel’s definition of presence.

Copresence is the experience of presence – *plus* the experience of one or more others in that same place or space.
Thus copresence – as per my earlier email - is partly caused by avatar interaction, partly by human-machine interaction.

This excludes books, multimedia and all the forms of mediated interaction in the disciplines mentioned in Mel’s comment – *except* insofar as they bear on the experience of presence – and copresence.

Mel is right to say that all experience is mediated. But only certain (VR/VE) technologies support the experience of presence – yet I see no reason to exclude copresence from this area of research just because it involves more than human-machine interaction.

This is a concise definition, with a very focused and delimited area of research – but it does mean adding copresence to the study of presence,
Best,
Ralph

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hi, in the definition that we follow we do not need to distinguish
between co-presence and presence as different concepts, rather they
are different areas of focus within the study of presence.

If we think of presence as people's response to virtual sensory data,
and the extent to which they respond realistically (including their
sense of being there, including their psychological and emotional
responses etc), then this applies whether they are in a pure virtual
reality, augmented reality, etc - it is still the same, do they
respond realistically?

Now in particular area of reseach you might be interested in
particular in how realistic their spatial responses are.

In a different area of work you might be interested in how realistic
their behaviour and responses are in relation to virtual characters,
or representations of online remote people.

Etc. These are not different concepts (presence, spatial presence,
copresence etc) but different focuses of research within the overall
area of presence. For each new thing we might be interested in (eg,
how realistic is people's physiological response) we would not want to
invent a new concept (physiological presence?). If we were interested
in the blink rate would we need "blinking presence"? I don't think
so.

regards
Mel
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Mel and others,
I agree with what Mel says, except that I think that copresence is such an
important dimension of presence that it deserves to be a special area of
research in its own right: much of our research nowadays is the study of how
realistically people respond to virtual characters (in the sense, not of
agents, but representations of real people). Spatial presence (for single
user environments) and copresence (for multiuser or collaborative
environments) are by far the most important topics of research for the
foreseeable future - they dwarf anything else by comparison, though of
course this does not exclude other areas of presence research.
Best,
Ralph
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Dear Mel, Ralph,
in my opinion both of you are right. Presence research is a broad area and the experience of co-presence is related to another agent.

What in my opinion has to be changed is the starting point: not "virtual sensory data" but intention.

In my view the core of the concept of presence is "intention":

* Presence: is the feeling of successfully transforming an intention in action (enaction)

* Tele-presence: is the feeling of successfully transforming an intention in action through a medium

* Co-Presence: is the feeling of successfully recognizing the intention of an agent in his action

In this vision, the concept of action has a broad sense, as discussed by the activity theory:

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11004

Neuroscience showed recently that both the enaction and the recognition of intentions are connected by the bimodal neurons (mirror and canonical) recently identified by the Rizzolatti group in the frontal pre-cortex.

http://www.unipr.it/arpa/mirror/english/staff/rizzolat.htm

How this has an impact on the development of a VR/haptic system? Intention is very complex to handle in term of technical implementation. Typically the problem is that the user tries to use the device in a way that was not pre-defined by the developer: technology does not allow the enactment of an intention.

The best way to overcome this is to define a specific context that clearly drives intention. Another way is to use interviews and focus groups to understand what intentions the user enacts in a specific situation, to model the technology accordingly.

For instance, I want to create a virtual haptic system to allow an expert trainer to teach dance to a distant user (the dance scenario of the Immersense project). How does the trainer expect to use touch to guide the learner? The technology has to support this intention.

If the critical feature is pressure, e.g. the teacher uses different level of pressure to help the learner to focus on a specific body part, the technology has to allow the teacher to do this. If the teacher can do it effectively, he will be present in the action. Otherwise, if he is not able to grade the level of pressure, he will experience a break in presence: he has to understand how to use the technology to overcome this limitation and to enact the original intention.

The concept of break in presence is one of the main contribution of Mel's research work to this area. But what is broken? In my opinion is the enacting process to be broken, the process used by the subject to transform the intention in action. And obviously, this is a contextualized process, dependent on context and subject's goals.

Ciao

Giuseppe

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Hi, I agree that they are special and important areas.
But still ... presence.
Here is a rough idea of what I would say:

"Within presence there is a particular domain of great interest, that
is, the response of people to virtual characters. We call the study of
this aspect of presence 'copresence', this is the study of presence in
a particular context. There are many such contexts, for example, how
people behave spatially in another particular important area of study.
This might be referred to as 'spatial presence'. Note that in all of
these possible cases we are interested in the same types of things -
to what extent are people's responses realistic in the particular
context in which they are located. Response is taken at any dimension
that is of interest - including of course their physiological,
psychological, behavioural, emotional, and cognitive responses, and
their sense of actually being in the location depicted. However, each
specialised area of study, such as copresence, will have its own
particular domain of interest - for example, we might be interested in
to what extent people blush when a virtual character says something to
them that is embarrassing - but we probably would not be interested in
blushing in the context of 'spatial presence'. So the specific
responses that might be studied in the different instances of presence
of interest may vary, depending also on the applications context. In
this sense 'presence research' might be thought of equally as a
methodology, as well as the phenomena that we observe every day our
virtual reality laboratories. We can imagine that each of these
specialist areas would develop particular tools, and might be
considered as different aspects of the same underlying phenomena. An
analogy would be physics - there are physisists who concentrate on
cosmological issues (such as gravity, time, space etc) and others who
concentrate on the micro level (statistical mechanics etc).
Nevertheless in spite of these being quite different aspects of
physics, there is of course the search for the Unified Theory. Were
there a Unified Theory of presence, it would help us to understand the
mechanisms underlying the phenomena themselves, not just one
particular aspect."
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[TO GIUSEPPE]

hi,I dont agree or disagree with any of this as a pure statement in itself.
It is just that is not what we are doing in PRESENCCIA, it is not the
view of presence we are dealing with. But it is fine, we don't all
have to agree.
The problem I have is that starting from "intention" doesn't give me
even a starting point. I no longer know what I am dealing with. It is
too unspecific. Sorry about this, but it is my empirical training, I
want something concrete. Looking at people's responses and their
initiation of actions in the context of virtual sensory data is quite
concrete, even if we cannot always elicit or measure what we would
like to measure.
Well it is my intention to finish writing this email, an act that is
mediated ....
Mel

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Well, you know your intention ;-). So you know when something breaks its transformation in action , e.g. a faulty keyboard.

Intention, for a psychologist, corresponds well to "initiation of actions" and mediated perception to "virtual sensory data".

The main difference is in the focus of our research: my one is the acting and communicating subject, your one virtual technology and computer graphics. But in presence they meet... And this is the funny part of this research area: we have to understand each other to succeed.

For example, I'm sure that in your Virtual Milgram experiment, if you manipulate the intentional ability of the avatar you will obtain different results: the less the avatar expresses intentionality, the less is the emotional response, independently by its graphical realism.

Giuseppe

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For example, I'm sure that in your Virtual Milgram experiment, if you manipulate the intentional ability of the avatar you will obtain different results: the less the avatar expresses intentionality, the less is the emotional response, independently by its graphical realism.


Hi, yes of course!
But ... from my point of view this is using virtual reality as a lab
to study psychological processes. That is great. It can only work if
presence is already operating, otherwise the normal everyday
psychological processes will not work.

Anyway, probably many people, especially me, don't like to get 000s of
emails in a thread like this.

So I think we should follow Guilio's advice and move the discussion to
the web site peach has created.

best wishes and have a nice weekend
Mel