When “Being There” is Not Enough

1. When “Being There” is Not Enough Prabu David Ohio State University ICA 2004 May 28, 2004 David.15@osu.edu

2. Purpose 1 The purpose of this talk is to examine whether Lombard and Ditton’s “being there” definition of presence is being interpreted too loosely by the presence community. The broad conceptualization of presence, such as the stretching of the definition to account for the book problem, while intellectually interesting, fails to distinguish between presence and experience.

3. Purpose 2 If presence is conceptualized as experience, then a theory of presence becomes a theory of everything, which is not very useful for presence research. Hence, the construct of presence needs boundary conditions. A few boundary conditions and a slightly tweaked definition of presence is offered.

4. Environments Most would agree that the construct of presence is somehow related to “being there” or some form of experienced spatial transportation into or away from an environment. Three environments deserve attention. Physical Environment (Space-Time Frame of Reference: Sheraton Hotel, Disneyworld, Memphis airport 5/28, 1 p.m.) Virtual Environment (Mediated: Rainforest seen through HMD, or Star Trek video game) Experienced Environment (User experience: Perceptual inputs and higher level processing)

5. Scenarios Teenager playing a game of Jurassic Park in an Interactive Virtual Environment at a theme park. Teenager who takes a Jurassic Park thrill-ride with multi-sensory input in an augmented reality environment. Teenager who is totally engrossed in a OSU-Michigan football game. Dad reads Jurassic Park at an airport in Memphis and is totally transported in space and time, he almost misses the plane.

6. Scenario by Environment In each of the scenarios, presence is involved, but the theory of presence should focus only on the top two scenarios.

7. Conditions for Redefining Presence has both medium properties and experiential components. While the psychological space-time transportation of presence or “being there” is important, two conditions are germane to this discussion Level of sensory input Power of illusion In other words, the study of presence should focus on the power of sensory inputs to create automatic illusions with little or no concerted effort on the part of the user Perhaps akin to a mindless response shown in the CASA research of Nass, Reeves and Moon

8. Fodorian Modules In this vision, I am placing more emphasis on the Fodorial input modules, which are dedicated, neuronal groupings for sensory perception and language. Presence achieved through active, higher-level processing in the neo-cortex can be achieved without simulation and mediation How about social presence? In fact, FFA or Face Fusigyrus Area has been implicated in face perception

9. Physiological Measures and fMRI The focus on physiological variables and fMRI research is an interesting development in presence research Perhaps the biggest challenge is identifying the neural mechanisms that help us distinguish between a virtual dinosaur and a real dinosaur. Simply demonstrating with fMRI that brain activations triggered by a virtual rogue elephant are similar to brain activation triggered by a real rogue elephant is not enough. Identifying how the two are differently experienced and represented in the brain is the key.

10. Conclusion Tweaked Definition: Feeling of being there that is achieved through sensory inputsintended to simulate an illusion. This makes presence an interesting communication research topic because it opens up the study of various configurations of multi-sensory inputs and the experiences of the user, which we have not been able to address in the past.