more on presence scope

Hi,
The definition that includes

"- Presence - deals with the way the brain constructs the model of reality and self."

... I still don't think it is suitable as the definition of presence research.

The problem is that it is a major quest of neuroscience / psychology etc as a whole. I.e., its scope is too wide.

There is a unique phenomenon that occurs with (some) mediated technologies. Imagine the following thought experiment. You put on a head mounted display that has an adjustable field of view. You start with the field of view at 15 deg (horizontal) and let's say that it has constant 90deg vertical. You gradually adjust the field of view degree by degree, and suddenly there is qualitative change.
Whereas in the early stages you were looking at something, after the change you are somewhere.
Whereas before you saw images of a car moving on the road, now you are standing on the road, the car is coming towards you and you want to get out of the way.

Yes, presence is to do with "the way the brain constructs the model of reality and self" but its domain is "virtual reality" etc, not how the brain works in general. This is a more tractable problem. Of course if we knew how in general the brain works, ie, if we had the "theory of everything" then we would understand presence too. But we don't. Of course what we learn about presence in vr would also help towards the "theory of everthing".

So my point is to have a reasonable scope to the definition, in order to make "presence research" something concrete and specific.

Mel

More on the "balls schema"

Dear colleagues,
sorry for entering this discussion at this late point!

I think, that Guiseppe and others made an important point by postulating that the communication situation (and the whole "presence" experience) must be different if the user believes to be in a social communication situation. This must be a psychologically different experience to experiencing to be in a virtual environment alone. If we should give this experience the label "social presence" or not is something we should discuss. The articles by Rains & Scott (Communication Theory, 2007) and Tanis & Postmes (Computers in Human Behavior, 2007) on anonymity in media communication contain a lot of ideas that might be useful to further study social presence situations in media communication.

Mel Slater wants us to restrict the field of study to virtual reality or virtual environments phenomena as the major communication contexts we should study in the future in order to systematically explore presence. To my opinion, this is a very good advice because at this point of study it seems a good idea to do research more "economically", e.g., by identifiying major communication settings we all want to do research on so that relevant progress can be made as regards to some common results. Also, we have to keep in mind that new media phenomena are those which the EU has up to now been ready to finance. The above mentioned discussion on social presence is in line with this thinking. This does not mean, that we should exclude basic research projects and methodological studies that might be helpful to the topic of presence but were done in the context of traditional media. As long as the results are promising and transferable to presence research, we should include them.

I am not convinced that the topic of presence is dead. All the knowledge the sciences of psychology, sociology and communication can offer to study new media and any other technologically advanced environment supposed to be used by human beings has to be systematically explored in order to give the technical disciplines like engineering, computer science, architecture etc. a helping hand to understand the human user dimension of their technical innovations. We started with the topic "presence", but in my opinion this is only a first step in the right direction. A huge array of topics to research on is waiting for us in the future. And it is important research and not simply Kuhnian "puzzle solving"! Therefore, it is so hard to structure the field.

We should have a symposium with representatives from psychology, sociology and communication research (who are well prepared and ready to present their views of the field and its future in a focused way) at the next conference in Barcelona. To my opinion, it is high time to concentrate on this discussion. I wouldn't be surprised, if at the end of this meeting we are able to describe different presence phenomena under study (with different definitions leading to different research questions), so that the whole field develops a totally new structure, a natural process that I know from other fields of research (no matter, if they are interdiscipinary or stricly disciplinary) too.

Best regards,
Angela Schorr

More on meaning of Presence

Dear Giulio,
I was back today from a conference. I agree a lot on your first statement: the main goal is to understand how the brain constructs the model of reality and self.

Your definition of Hyper Presence is similar to the one of Media Presence introduced by Coelho and colleagues:

http://www.vepsy.com/communication/book7/9_2_Coelho.pdf

This is the abstract:

Abstract. Presence is widely accepted as the key concept to be considered in any research involving human interaction with Virtual Reality (VR). Since its original description, the concept of presence has developed over the past decade to be considered by many researchers as the essence of any experience in a virtual environment.

The VR generating systems comprise two main parts: a technological component and a psychological experience. The different relevance given to them produced two different but coexisting visions of presence: the rationalist and the psychological/ecological points of view. The rationalist point of view considers a VR system as a collection of specific machines with the necessity of the inclusion of the concept of presence. The researchers agreeing with this approach describe the sense of presence as a function of the experience of a given medium (Media Presence). The main result of this approach is the definition of presence as the perceptual illusion of non-mediation produced by means of the disappearance of the medium from the conscious attention of the subject. At the other extreme, there is the psychological or ecological perspective (Inner Presence). Specifically, this perspective considers presence as a neuropsychological phenomenon, evolved from the interplay of our biological and cultural inheritance, whose goal is the control of the human activity.

Apparently we have a common research field - Presence - that deals with the way the brain constructs the model of reality and self.

- Media Presence/Hyper Presence is focused on how techology can simulate the way brain constructs the model of reality and self.

- Inner Presence is is focused on how brain constructs the model of reality and self.

Giuseppe

__________________
Dear Giuseppe,

Excellent: common ground!

Minor refinements:

- Presence - deals with the way the brain constructs the model of reality and self.

-Media Presence/Hyper Presence is focused on how immersive technology can alter the way brain constructs the model of reality and self.

- Inner Presence is is focused on how brain constructs the model of reality and self.

Giulio
_____________________________

Giulio, We still also need a model of how people construct a model of the other or others that they experience presence with – ie. copresence or social presence!
Ralph

______________________
Dear Giulio, to cope with Ralph's remark, that is surely relevant, you can change "self" with "selves" in the below definitions. It is an easy way not to forget Social Presence research in Presence agenda. Ciao. Giuseppe
___________________________________
Dear Giuseppe, Ralph, Hmm, I am more binary about this.

There is me, then the rest (the "not me"). The "not me", or reality, includes others as part of the scenery. My brain builds models of other people as well. You may not exist after all...he he.

- Presence - deals with the way the brain constructs the model of
self and reality--including others.

Giulio
_______________________________

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
___________________
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
________________________________

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
_____________
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
_________________

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

_____________________
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
________________________________________

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
_____________________________________
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

______________________
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."
________________________________
[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

_____________________

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

_________________________________
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

Definitions of Presence

This is the one I like:

The research field of Presence studies how the human brain constructs the model of reality and self using replacement/augmentation of sensorial data and interaction, and guides the development for the development of technologies for interaction (VR) and machine intelligence.

As a experimental benchmark, it uses measurable successful replacement/augmentation of sensory data with virtual generated data, where ‘success’ can be defined by analyzing the response of the subject in physiological, behavioral and subjective terms in relation to a “real” situation.

To distinguish this specific form of "Presence" reseearch from other relevant ones, I would propose the use of a new term for Presence in VR: HyperPresence.

This term is for the field of Presence as we have been discussing so far but restricted to research, technologies and applications in which, as a target, the augmentation/replacement of human sensors and actuators uses an information bandwidth larger than, say, a Gigabit/s (this is just an example--I estimate back of the envelope this to be the information flux exchange from the CNS with the environment - back and forth).

The idea is to target full replacement, eventually.

In my view, both Presence and Co-Presence are part of the picture.

Are there any other estimates out there for information flux? Anyhow, the idea is to use information flux as a differentiating factor from other forms of Presence research (e.g., letters or faxes).

Giulio

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

___________________________

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
________________________________________

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











________________________________________________
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
_______________________________________
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

___________________________________


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

________________________________________

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
______________________________________________

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?

----------
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