Is the subjective feel of “presence” an uninteresting goal?

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Abstract

An ideal goal of virtual reality technology is to deliver a complete visual and sensorimotor duplicate of an object: a fully integrated haptic and visual set of stimuli that would make us feel as if we are in the “presence” of the real object in an ordinary situation. The goal is very ambitious, but what is a measure of success? An analysis of presence is much needed, and one of the main tenets of our paper is that an empirical study of the psychological aspects of the feel of presence would constitute the pivotal element of such an analysis; we shall argue that some interesting lessons can be learned about the ideal goal. To sustain our argument, we consider two case studies in turn. The tunnel effect case teaches us that actual stimulation is neither necessary nor sufficient to convey presence. The picture case teaches us that it is possible to learn how to interact to a high degree of success with very impoverished stimuli and successfully compensate for poor stimulation. Research should thus be oriented not towards potentially useless and costly “duplication” of reality, but towards the unexplored potentialities offered by new and complex interfaces.

Section snippets

Photorealism and non-photorealism

The development of realism in computer graphics and of virtual reality represents an important challenge for computer science. This effort in computer science raises a number of questions related to the challenge of creating increasingly realistic environments and of establishing a naturalistic interaction with computer mediated situations. Perceptual studies, cognitive sciences and philosophy are sometimes invoked both because of the feedback of these developments onto the analysis of human

Presence: perception and interaction

Different authors conceive Presence as a subjective feeling and as a multidimensional construct. As a subjective feeling, Presence is construed as the private sensation of the user of “being there” in the virtual environment, which overcomes the impression of being in a laboratory room, facing a computer screen or a virtual reality device.

Presence is defined as the subjective experience of being in one place or environment, even when one is physically situated in another” [5, p. 225].

The

Object perception. The non-necessity of the complete-stimulus situation

Let us consider a first case of object perception. I’m looking at my cat; the cat is in the garden, behind the fence. Even if I don’t see all of the body of my cat, the cat is somehow present in front of me as a complete animal, and not as a strange combination of disconnected segments of a cat, separated by pieces of wood. Besides, even when the cat is in front of the fence, I see it as a complete cat, not as a cat-like convex and furry surface with no interior and no backside.

This is an

Perceptual mechanisms of simplification and integration. Complete stimulation is not sufficient

It is important to know, and to be ready to exploit, the mechanisms of perceptual integration and simplification. In natural conditions, in fact, the perceptual system has to deal with a great wealth of information of different kinds. In the case of a moving object, for example a red toy car, which is moved along a racing circuit, information about the trajectory and velocity has to be calculated, and information from the visual, kinaesthetic, tactile, and even auditory stimuli has to be

The lesson of ordinary pictures

If Presence is not only a technologically hard but possibly also an unnecessary goal, what lessons could be drawn about the design of interfaces for handling virtual realities? Should we just give up the quest for complex interfaces?

Not so quickly. Over and above photorealism there are other interesting directions in which one may want to look. Consider ordinary static 2D pictures, such as dinner-party photographs or drawings. When looking at a picture we have the feeling that the depicted

Conclusions

We have suggested that the question of Presence in virtual environments should not be faced as an attempt to just reproduce or enhance the subjective feeling of the user of being translated in another situation. We have suggested to tackle the problem of presence by establishing a wider spectrum of conditions that make a virtual object present to the user of a virtual environment. In order to avoid confusion, we prefer to maintain the use of the term ‘presence’ for the subjective feeling of

Acknowledgements

Reserach for this paper was partly funded by the European Commission 6th PCRD Network of Excellence “Enactive interfaces”. Elena Pasquinelli's work was further funded by Percro lab. Elena Pasquinelli would like to thank researchers of Percro lab for enriching discussions and for the possibility of testing virtual reality systems and haptic devices.

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