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. A more advanced human-centred interaction with systems would provide users with a sense of being there, close to if not equivalent to the experience of actual presence. Creating this sense of presence remains a major challenge and is leading to the development of new interdisciplinary research, combining cognitive psychology, haptic (sense of touch) studies, computer graphics and multimedia design, advanced communication theory and socio-cultural issues. A theory of presence, emerging through this interdisciplinary research, that explores the cognitive and affective roots of sensory perception, is expected to give rise to the design of innovative systems that offer “richer” experiences than any current media and communication technologies. This, however, is no easy task. Many researchers, artists and designers have explored the role of the sense of presence in interactive experience. While there is still not a general consensus about what presence actually is, it is fair to say that most investigators agree about what it is not. Presence is not the degree of technological immersion, it is not the same thing as emotional engagement, it is not absorption or attention or action; but all of these have a potential role in understanding the experience of presence in interaction – the experience of interacting with presence. The feeling of presence is a crucial aspect of many recent and developing interactive technologies. The illusion of being present is the key ingredient that gives interactive media the power to affect people profoundly, to change them. Due to the complexity of the topic, and the interest in this concept, many different attempts to explain the nature of mediated presence have been made. The most basic distinction concerns the issue of technology. For many researchers, mediated presence