History of Telepresence

See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227591938 History of Telepresence Chapter · January 2006 DOI: 10.1002/0470022736.ch1 CITATIONS READS 23 2,984 1 author: Wijnand A Ijsselsteijn Eindhoven University of Technology 314 PUBLICATIONS 11,558 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects: Restorative Environments and Healing Media View project Telepresence, Immersion & Embodiment in Mediated Environments View project All content following this page was uploaded by Wijnand A Ijsselsteijn on 29 May 2018. The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. 1 History of Telepresence Wijnand A. IJsselsteijn Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Nether- lands ”When anything new comes along, everyone, like a child discovering the world, thinks that they’ve invented it, but you scratch a little and you find a caveman scratching on a wall is creating virtual reality in a sense. What is new here is that more sophisticated instruments give you the power to do it more easily. Virtual reality is dreams” Morton Heilig, quoted in Hamit (1993), p. 57. 1.1 Introduction The term telepresence was first used in the context of teleoperation by Marvin Minsky (suggested to him by his friend Pat Gunkel) in a bold 1979 funding proposal Toward a Remotely-Manned Energy and Production Economy, the essentials of which were laid down in his classic 1980 paper on the topic (Minsky 1980). It refers to the phenomenon that a human operator develops a sense of being physically present at a remote location through interaction with the system’s human interface, that is, through the user’s actions and the subsequent perceptual feedback he/she receives via the appropriate teleoperation technology. The concept of presence had been discussed earlier in the context of theatrical performances, where actors are said to have a ’stage presence’ (to indicate a certain strength and convincingness in the actor’s stage appearance and performance). Bazin 3-D Videocommunications.EditedbyO.Schreer,P.Kauff,andT.Sikora c 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd HISTORY OF TELEPRESENCE 2 (1967) also discussed this type of presence in relation to photography and cinema. He writes: ”Presence, naturally, is defined in terms of time and space. ’To be in the presence of someone’ is to recognise him as existing contemporaneously with us and to note that he comes within the actual range of our senses - in the case of cinema of our sight and in radio of our hearing. Before the arrival of photography and later of cinema, the plastic arts (especially portraiture) were the only intermediaries between actual physical presence and absence.” - Bazin (1967), p. 96, originally published in Esprit in 1951. Bazin noted that in theatre, actors and spectators have a reciprocal relationship, both being able to respond to each other within shared time and space. With television, and any other broadcast medium, this reciprocity is incomplete in one direction, adding a new variant of ’pseudopresence’ between presence and absence. Bazin: ”The spectator sees without being seen. There is no return flow....Nevertheless, this state of not being present is not truly an absence. The television actor has a sense of the million of ears and eyes virtually present and represented by the electronic camera.” - Bazin (1967), p. 97, footnote. The sense of being together and interacting with others within a real physical space can be traced back to the work of Goffman (1963), who used the concept of co- presence to indicate the individual’s sense of perceiving others as well as the awareness of others being able to perceive the individual: ”The full conditions of co-presence, however, are found in less variable circumstances: persons must sense that they are close enough to be perceived in whatever they are doing, including their experiencing of others, and close enough to be perceived in this sensing of being perceived.” - Goffman (1963), p. 17. This mutual and recursive awareness has a range of consequences on how individ- uals present themselves to others. Note, however, that Goffman applied the concept of co-presence only to social interactions in ’real’ physical space. In our current society, the sense of co-presence throughamediumis of significant importance as a grow- ing number of our human social interactions are mediated, rather than co-located in physical space. Since the early 1990s onwards, presence has been studied in relation to various media, most notably virtual environments (VEs). Sheridan (1992) refers to presence elicited by a VE as ’virtual presence’, whereas he uses ’telepresence’ for the case of teleoperation that Minsky (1980) was referring to. From the point of view of psycho- logical analysis, a distinction based on enabling technologies is unnecessary and the broader term presence is used in this chapter to include both variations. A number of authors have used the terms ’presence’ and ’immersion’ interchange- ably, as they regard them as essentially the same thing. However, in this chapter, they are considered as different concepts, in line with, for instance, Slater and Wilbur HISTORY OF TELEPRESENCE 3 (1997) and Draper et al. (1998). Immersion is a term which is reserved here for de- scribing a set of physical properties of the media technology that may give rise to presence. A media system that offers display and tracking technologies that match and support the spatial and temporal fidelity of real-world perception and action is considered immersive. For an overview of criteria in the visual domain, see IJsselsteijn (2003). In a similar vein, Slater and Wilbur (1997) refer to immersion as the objec- tively measurable properties of a VE. According to them it is the ”extent to which computer displays are capable of delivering an inclusive, extensive, surrounding, and vivid illusion of reality to the senses of the VE participant” (p. 604). Presence can be conceptualised as the experiential counterpart of immersion - the human response. Presence and immersion are logically separable, yet several studies show a strong empirical relationship, as highly immersive systems are likely to engender a high degree of presence for the participant. Lombard and Ditton (1997) reviewed a broad body of literature related to presence and identified six different conceptualizations of presence: realism, immersion, transportation, social richness, social actor within medium, and medium as social actor. Based on the commonalities between these different conceptualizations, they provide a unifying definition of presence as the perceptual illusion of non-mediation, that is, the extent to which a person fails to perceive or acknowledge the existence of a medium during a technologically mediated experience. The conceptualizations Lom- bard and Ditton identified can roughly be divided into two broad categories - physical and social. The physical category refers to the sense of being physically located in mediated space, whereas the social category refers to the feeling of being together, of social interaction with a virtual or remotely located communication partner. At the intersection of these two categories, we can identify co-presence or a sense of being together in a shared space at the same time, combining significant characteristics of both physical and social presence. Figure 1.1 illustrates this relationship with a number of media examples that support the different types of presence to a varying extent. The examples vary signif- icantly in both spatial and temporal fidelity. For example, while a painting may not necessarily represent physical space with a great degree of accuracy (although there are examples to the contrary, as we shall see), interactive computer graphics (i.e., virtual environments) have the potential to engender a convincing sense of physical space by immersing the participant and supporting head-related movement parallax. For communication systems, the extent to which synchronous communication is sup- ported varies considerably. Time-lags are significant in the case of letters, and almost absent in the case of telephone or videoconferencing. It is clear that physical and social presence are distinct categories that can and should be meaningfully distinguished. Whereas a unifying definition, such as the one provided by Lombard and Ditton (1997), accentuates the common elements of these different categories, it is of considerable practical importance to keep the differences between these categories in mind as well. The obvious difference is that of communication which is central to social presence but unnecessary to establish a sense of physical presence. Indeed, a medium can provide a high degree of physical presence without having the capacity for transmitting reciprocal communicative signals at all. Conversely, one can experience a certain amount of social presence, or the ’nearness’ HISTORY OF TELEPRESENCE 4 Figure 1.1: A graphical illustration of the relationship between physical presence, social presence and co-presence, with various media examples. Abbreviations: VR = Virtual Reality; LBE = Location-Based Entertainment; SVEs = Shared Virtual Environments; MUDs = Multi-User Dungeons. Technologies vary in both spatial and temporal fidelity. of communication partners, using applications that supply only a minimal physical representation, as is the case, for example, with telephone or internet chat. This is not to say, however, that the two types of presence are unrelated. There are likely to be a number of common determinants, such as the immediacy of the interaction, that are relevant to both social and physical presence. As illustrated in Figure 1.1, applications such as videoconferencing or shared virtual environments are in fact based on providing a mix of both the physical and social components. The extent to which shared space adds to the social component is an empirical question, but several studies have shown that as technology increasingly conveys non-verbal communicative cues, such as facial expression, gaze direction, gestures, or posture, social presence will increase.

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