Social disturbances are common in schizophrenia and can be quite severe, significantly affecting functioning in a variety of ways. Yet the kinds of social disruptions experienced by persons with schizophrenia show a great deal of variability and are difficult to explain with available data. This article considers the variety of intersubjective disturbances that can occur in schizophrenia from a...

The current paper describes research that is aimed at elucidating our understanding of media technology factors that may help users of exercise equipment to stay motivated for doing regular workouts. In particular, we investigated the effects of immersion and coaching by a virtual agent on intrinsic motivation and the sense of presence of participants cycling on a stationary home exercise bike....

Kei Kikuiri, Nobuhiko Naka and Shinya Abe The high-quality speech coding is a super-wideband speech coding technique for providing high-quality VoIP services in a high-speed wireless communication environment, and was developed in collaboration with DoCoMo Communications Laboratories USA, Inc. This technology encodes and transmits nearly all of the frequency components of the human voice to all...

Over the last decade, we designed and used three media spaces: Teamrooms, Notification Collage, and Community Bar. All were oriented towards creating a shared environment supporting a small community of people: about two to around twenty members were expected to inhabit the media space. All provided others with a sense of presence through portrait images and/or snapshot-based video of its membe...

Outdoor Virtual Environments (OVEs) are becoming increasingly popular, as they allow a sense of Presence in places that are inaccessible or protected from human intervention. These Virtual Environments (VEs) need to address physical modalities other than vision and hearing. We analyze the influence of four different physical modalities (vision, hearing, haptics and olfaction) on the sense of pr...

Framework is presented for measuring human experience in virtual environment (VE). Human experience is defined as the content of direct observation or participation in an event. Both psychological and emotional properties are integrated into this ongoing person–environment interaction to give an experience meaning and value and to enhance its quality and intensity. The sense of presence, i.e., ...

This paper proposes a model of interaction in virtual environments which we term the immersion, presence, performance (IPP) model. This model is based on previous models of immersion and presence proposed by Barfield and colleagues and Slater and colleagues. The IPP model describes the authors’ current conceptualization of the effects of display technology, task demands, and attentional resourc...

This thesis is concerned with the design of Virtual Environments (VEs) in particular with the tools and techniques used to describe interesting and useful environments. This concern is not only with respect to the appearance of objects in the VE but also with their behaviours and their reactions to actions of the participants. The main research hypothesis is that there are several advantages to...

This paper investigates aspects in designing auditory spaces to support novel forms of interaction in virtual spaces. Initial research on human imagined sounds from places has identified ‘expectation’ as an important psychological construct. Second study shows that there are differences between sounds people expect to hear in places and sounds recorded from real life places. Instead of designin...

Presence perceptions (i.e., perceptions of nonmediation in technology-mediated environments, Lombard & Ditton, 1997) have been demonstrated to influence consumers’ attitudes and intentions in online shopping situations; the factors leading to presence, however, are not well understood. In business-to-consumer e-commerce environments, factors such as task characteristics (i.e., searching versus ...