Matthew Lombard

Interactive Advertising and Presence

Abstract New communication technologies are creating new challenges for the advertising industry. While digital and high definition television, e-mail, the World Wide Web, and other new technologies represent new possibilities for advertisers, there is little information available regarding how to take advantage of them. There are indications that applying traditional models, designed for media that provide users with a passive, impersonal experience, will be unsuccessful for the new interactive digital media. A growing body of research and theory on the concept of presence may provide a valuable framework for advertisers as they try to adapt to the changing media environment. This paper considers some of the ways advertising is evolving to incorporate interactive media and how work on presence can guide that evolution.

Direct Responses to People on the Screen Television and Personal Space

An experiment was conducted to extend the research evidence concerning direct responses to the realm of social interaction by replicating, in the context of television viewing, key findings and predictions concerning the use of interpersonal distance. In the study, 32 subjects watched excerpts of television news broadcasts that featured individual anchors speaking to the camera. Apparent interpersonal distance was manipulated via viewing distance (close = 10, 24, and 38 inches; normal = 30, 72, and 115 inches) and screen size (small = 10 inches measured diagonally; medium = 26 inches; large = 42 inches). Although results for the viewing distance manipulation failed to support predictions, as expected, subjects watching larger television screens reported more positive emotional responses to the people on the screen and the viewing environment and selected a viewing position that represented a smaller withdrawal from the encounter. Implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.

Anthropocentrism and computers

Abstract This paper introduces the multi-dimensional concept of anthropocentrism with respect to computers, the tendency to believe that (1) computers do not possess human physical and psychological capabilities; and (2) it is not acceptable for computers to fill routinized (e.g., auto mechanic), interpretive (e.g., newspaper reporter), and persona) (e.g., baby sitter) roles traditionally held only by people. A mail survey (n = 133) of individuals in Northern California focuses on individual differences rather than differences between technologies. As suggested by the literature on ethnocentrism, experience with other cultures and education are strong predictors of the dimensions of anthropocentrism; surprisingly, experience with computers fails as a predictor.

The role of screen size in viewer responses to television fare

Consumer demand for large screen television sets is on the rise, with sales of 27 inch and larger sets exceeding the most optimistic industry expectations. One reason for this demand may be that a large screen television delivers a different, more enjoyable, more intense viewing experience than a small screen model. This greater intensity may also indicate that large screen viewers experience a sense of presence, a feeling that they are in the environment portrayed on the screen. Eighty undergraduate students viewed 17 brief segments of a variety of current television programs on a consumer‐model television with either a small screen (12 inches, measured diagonally) or a large screen (46 inches). Subjects’ evaluative responses were measured via a questionnaire. Although they did not report greater enjoyment when watching the large screen, when differences between the perceived quality of the sets was controlled viewers reported a variety of more intense responses to the images on the large screen.

Toward a Core Bibliography of Presence

ACORE LITERATURE Is a set of published written works that are considered “essential,” “significant,” “of lasting importance,” or “of permanent value” to an area of study. It is assumed that although each scholar has specific and often unique interests within a topic area and therefore considers many written works concerning those interests to be “fundamental,” most members of an area of scholarly study will share a foundational knowledge, and that this knowledge will be represented in certain more commonly respected written works in the area. These works constitute a core literature. Researchers have attempted to construct lists and compilations of core literatures in fields and subfields including psychology,1 sports psychology,2 psychology of perception,3 psychiatry,4 organization development,5 famology (the study of families),6 family dynamics of addiction,7 American literature,8,9 law,10,11 econometrics,12 and agricultural sciences.13 Many of these efforts have been motivated by a desire to provide a resource for students, teachers, and others. For students, such compilations represent an introduction to the historical development and current focus of their field. Works in a core literature can also help illustrate to students the characteristics of valuable work in their field and insight into the characteristics of valued scholarship in the area. Awareness that they have read or reviewed works in a core literature might also reassure them that they are prepared to enter the field as scholars and teachers. Teachers can utilize core literatures as they develop curricula and reading lists (e.g., a personal review of core literature in law by Day11 was prompted by the desire to develop a course on legal “classics”). Gorenflo1 suggests that core literature reference lists can also help editors of introductory textbooks ensure representativeness, and researchers, publishers, and librarians are likely to benefit in a variety of ways from the identification of core literatures. While pedagogy has motivated many studies of core literatures, others have been designed to identify the direction in which a field is moving,11 review key work during a particularly important era,13 identify areas within disciplines,5 and assess the disciplinary status of topic areas.6 The following bibliography constitutes a draft version of a core literature in the field of presence research and we hope it will serve many of the goals described above. The bibliography is divided into two main categories, books and papers. While this bibliography is selective, given the massive amount of literature available on presence and its related technologies (virtual reality, cinema, telerobotics, etc.), more comprehensive bibliographies are also available and for these we direct the reader to two online resources that have the specific goal of providing information to people working in the area of presence research:

When Real seems mediated: inverse presence

As our lives become increasingly dominated by mediated experiences, presence scholars have noted that an increasing number of these mediated experiences evoke (tele)-presence, perceptions that ignore or misconstrue the role of the medium in the experience. In this paper we explore an interesting countertrend that seems to be occurring as well. In a variety of contexts, people are experiencing not an illusion that a mediated experience is in fact nonmediated, but the illusion that a nonmediated real experience is mediated. Drawing on news reports and an online survey, we identify 3 categories of this illusion of mediation: positive (when people perceive natural beauty as mediated), negative (when people perceive a disaster, crime, or other tragedy such as the events of September 11, 2001, as mediated), and unusual (when close connections between peoples real life activities and mediated experiences lead them to confuse the former with the latter). We label this phenomenon inverse presence and consider its place and value in a comprehensive theory of presence, its possible antecedents and consequences, and what it suggests about the nature of our lives in the 21st century.

Immersed in Media: Telepresence Theory, Measurement & Technology

Throughout the last decades, research has generated a substantial body of theory about Spatial Presence experiences. This chapter reviews some of the most important existing theoretical explications. First, building on notions offered in literature, the core of the construct will be explicated: What exactly is meant by the term “Spatial Presence”? Second, theoretical views on the “feeling of being there” provided by different Presence researchers are introduced. Important aspects and determinants of Spatial Presence have been highlighted in the past, such as attentional processes and embodied cognition. However, coherent theoretical frameworks are rare and more empirical research seems necessary to advance the theoretical understanding of Spatial Presence. The chapter concludes with an overview about recent controversies and future trends in Spatial Presence research.Highlights key research currently being undertaken within the field of telepresence, providing the most detailed account of the field to date, advancing our understanding of a fundamental property of all media - the illusion of presence; the sense of being there inside a virtual environment, with actual or virtual others. This collection has been put together by leading international scholars from America, Europe, and Asia. Together, they describe the state-of-the-art in presence theory, research and technology design for an advanced academic audience. Immersed in Media provides research that can help designers optimize presence for users of advanced media technologies such as virtual and augmented reality, collaborative social media, robotics, and artificial intelligence and lead us to better understand human cognition, emotion and behaviour.

Uses and Gratifications: A Classic Methodology Revisited.

This paper describes the results of a uses and gratifications survey, based on the methodology of Katz, Gurevitch, and Haas (1973), that examined the extent to which different media fulfill a variety of human needs. The authors suggest that the Katz et al. (1973) method should be revisited when investigating uses and gratifications across several media. The paper outlines the uses and gratifications approach, describes the adapted survey and presents the results of data collected over four years from 241 respondents at a large urban American university.

Mediated presence: virtual reality, mixed environments and social networks

The processes through which human beings establish and experience presence in their life environment, especially when this environment is increasingly mediated and even generated by technologies, is a fascinating subject of scholarly investigation. Our expanding abilities to bring presence from the ‘‘real’’ world and from ‘‘real’’ human interactions to mediated worlds and mediated social relations represents an important chance to enrich human experience. Designing technologies and imagining practices to modify, prolong and reconfigure the possibilities of being present has been a continuous endeavour of the human species, from early attempts at constructing communication and transportation devices to the many current technologies we continue to develop to reach other places and people. Virtual business meetings via telepresence conferencing systems, remote medical consultations and even surgery, the recording and transmission of political unrest to the global community, web and virtual worldbased communities based on common concerns and interests, and compelling interactive single and massively multiplayer electronic games only begin to illustrate the power of technology-mediated presence, or telepresence. Exploring empirically and reflecting theoretically upon the conditions through which presence (and absence) are established, playing with presence possibilities, augmenting them, identifying the events and resources that affect them in different ways all help us better understand and reach our potential to communicate effectively and better understand the human experience. This special issue illustrates the variety of research questions and approaches being used to explore mediated presence in virtual reality, mixed environments and social networks. The opportunity to create the issue emerged during PRESENCE 2008, the 11th International Workshop on Presence. An open call to conference attendees and others yielded more than 30 submissions. After several revisions, and thanks to more than 90 experts who kindly served as reviewers, we are able to offer a remarkable collection of papers in this and a future issue, that provide an overview of the state of the art in the field. They include both theoretical essays and empirical studies and present new advances in well established lines of investigation as well as new theoretical and methodological approaches. Three papers all have in common the analysis of participants’ action as a method to investigate presence and social presence. The first in this group is ‘‘Afforded actions as a behavioral assessment of physical presence in virtual environments’’ by Jean-Claude Lepecq, Lionel Bringoux, Jean-Marie Pergandi, Thelma Coyle, and Daniel Mestre. The rationale behind the paper is that users who feel present in a virtual environment will behave as if they were in the environment. In the setting devised by the authors, the virtual movement produced by an avatar in entering a virtual door was accompanied by a rotation of the users’ real shoulders and this varied according to the actual size of the users’ shoulders and the size of the virtual door. While the study was only conducted with male participants and with a virtual environment uniquely designed to study the movement under investigation, its systematic results suggest that the sensorimotor affordances of a virtual environment can be used to objectively assess the achievement A. Spagnolli L. Gamberini University of Padova, Padua, Italy

Telepresence after death

This paper examines some of the increasingly sophisticated attempts by humans to evoke the presence of themselves or others after death and considers these efforts in the context of telepresence theory and research. Potential future research and ethical implications are also addressed.