parks and urban green spaces have always been places to spend hours away from the bustling life and its numerous problems. in the meantime, elderly people also have the same share from such spaces as other people. elderly, including old social groups with old age and decreasingly activities, have very leisure time and the possibility of using the urban park for voluntary and community activitie...

The present paper is a review of the role of individual factors in Spatial Presence. If Spatial Presence is a subjective mental phenomenon psychological factors must have an important role on it. Our review shows that, even though many authors claim about the need for a better understanding about this relation, empirical evidence is still very limited. Personality-related factors as absorption,...

Brian R. Johnson Design Machine Group, University of Washington [email protected] ABSTRACT Traditional design education relies heavily on passive presence awareness and unfocused interaction. Support for these modes of communication is largely absent from current computing environments. This paper reports on Compadres, a system for support of distributed collaborators through creation of gro...

This paper focuses on an extensive market analysis done under the framework of the Peach coordination action, a project funded by the European Union Future Emerging Technologies unit. The analysis identifies, classifies, reports and further elaborates on which areas presently benefit from Presence technologies. Taxonomy of these markets is also derived in this document, describing how and why P...

Presence has become a key concept in characterizing and evaluating Virtual Environments. Our contribution is to show that current measures of Presence, as a metric of users’ experience of Virtual Environments, are highly problematic: results from the literature cannot be repeated and it lacks a theoretical basis. We synthesize results from three experiments we conducted and in conclusion point ...

The role of VE content in the presence experience is controversial. Although a strong theoretical argument has been made that presence depends on the form of information presented and not the content, several relational studies have shown that content is strongly associated to presence. This paper presents an experiment which manipulated nondiegetic music played during exposure to a strongly th...

The concept of self-presence provides a framework for understanding how people connect to virtual self-representations on three distinct levels (body, emotions, and identity). The present study aims to build on previous support for the reliability and construct validity of this framework. Participants (N=81) who used avatars in a semester-long collaborative virtual group project were examined. ...