Negotiating Presence-In-Absence: Contact, Content and Context (original) (raw)

4 Presence as a Dimension of Communication: Context of Use and the Person

We claim that presence is elicited most strongly when information is presented as an inhabitable, external world. Technical developments that permit this, such as the creation of interactive, immersive virtual environments (VEs) herald a profound change in how people relate to sources of information, and how they communicate. This change has psychological, social and cultural effects. It has been claimed that in many ways, our relationship to information becomes that of our ancestral, pre-literate relationship to the physical world. By this view, we are heading for a post-literate future of body-based communication. But this view is too simple, since information must serve a variety of purposes, and how much presence is desirable in a communicative situation depends on many factors, including the communication devices available, the intended use and the context of use. In addition, differences between individuals, such as personality, as well as physical and psychological state, will affect how readily presence is invoked and also its impact on the individual concerned. In this chapter, we expand on the general notion of presence as a dimension of communication, and how this perspective can inform an understanding of designed variations in presence as a function of use, context, and individual psychological factors.

Presence as a dimension of communication: Context of use and the person

2006

Abstract. We claim that presence is elicited most strongly when information is presented as an inhabitable, external world. Technical developments that permit this, such as the creation of interactive, immersive virtual environments herald a profound change in how people relate to sources of information, and how they communicate. This change has psychological, social and cultural effects.

Introduction: Editors' Introduction to Interacting with Presence

This volume arose from a longstanding conviction that our subjective experience of information technology is profoundly affected by the extent to which we feel ourselves to be really present in the mediated worlds that the technology makes available to us. 'Presence' is just this "feeling of being inside the mediated world". It is a crucial and increasingly necessary element in both design and usage of many recent and developing interactive technologies. In the same way that 'feeling present', or consciously 'being there', in the physical world around us is based upon perception, physical action and activity in that world, so the feeling of presence in a technologically-mediated environment is a function of the possibilities for interaction.

Ambient telephony: Designing a communication system for enhancing social presence in home mediated communication

2009 3rd International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction and Workshops, 2009

The experience of telephonic communication in the home environment has remained very similar for decades: practical, but intrusive, and providing little experience of social presence. This paper presents the work aiming at improving the experience of social presence experience in telephony. We present the results of several user studies on telephone usage and based on these, propose the use of distributed speakerphone systems (or ambient telephones). We report empirical research comparing two different ambient telephone systems. The first system is an ambient system where the arrays of loudspeakers and microphones are embedded in the ceiling and the home audio system around the home. In the second experiment, we replaced the embedded system by a distributed set of clearly visible and tangible speakerphone units. We report lessons learned and implications for the design of ambient telephone systems.

9" Being there" and the Role of Presence Technology

2009

Abstract. This paper uses the metaphor of" being there" to differentiate two basic modes of mediated presence."'Being'there" refers to presence in a remote environment through sensory extension, and" being'there" refers to presence in a virtual environment through sensory simulation. In"'being'there," users believe that they are in contact with a real, albeit remote, environment, and their sense of" being there" is affected by the perceptual fidelity they receive.

Presence in the Emotional Space

Proceedings of Presence 2002, Porto, Portugal, October 2002., 2002

FARAWAY is a research project focused on long distance communication, emotions and presence. The aim of the project is to identify new directions and ways of thinking in order to design interactive applications that increase the sense of presence of a loved person over distance. In this abstract we present the theoretical and methodological basis of the project.