Elsevier

Computers & Graphics

Volume 28, Issue 4, August 2004, Pages 509-517
Computers & Graphics

PRESENCE: the sense of believability of inaccessible worlds

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cag.2004.04.006Get rights and content

Abstract

With the development of new instruments as telecommunication, teleoperation, computer representation tools, human beings are commonly in situation to perceive and act on spaces that are more and more distant or different from our physical world. These new tools raise nowadays the question of Presence of these distant spaces with a growing intensity. This question crosses disciplines as different as computer arts or nanosciences. Through two experimental situations in each of these fields, (1) the playing of a musical virtual instrument and (2) the manipulation of nano-objects, the paper analyses the minimal conditions that the computer models and the human–computer interactions have to satisfy to trigger the sense of presence of distant inaccessible objects, whatever they are. After examining the evolution of instrumental tools, machines and concepts from real means to televirtual ones via the teleoperation and telecommunication chains and via experiments for the investigated fields, the paper shows that the primary condition able to generate ab initio the sense of presence, should be the instillation of a minimal physical coherence in the representation of distant worlds, and the introduction of the “evoked matter” concept as a central paradigm for the Presence issue.

Introduction

Historically, the idea of a virtual world emerged from the evolution of our representation and manipulation tools. This concept reflects the convergence of two research fields: on one hand, the science and technology of representation (simulation, synthesis); and on the other, the science of observation and instrumental manipulation (physics, biology, etc.).

Concerning the first, the progress of synthesis and simulation techniques has given birth to synthetic worlds that can be seen, heard, touched, and manipulated, as the real world, revealing the difficulty of rendering them as present as real objects [1], [2]. Synthetic worlds are commonly used today in telecommunication, as a generic means of representation for humans and for communication between them. The finest part of this evolution is the Virtual Reality (VR) concept, more recently enhanced by the concepts of Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR).

Concerning the second, during this century, a striking epistemological break occurred in the designing of new instruments as well as of new theories. On one hand, we build instruments to explore and manipulate, more and more deeply, worlds that are not accessible to our senses and our common knowledge. On the other hand, our contemporary theories seem to be more and more foreign to the common human senses. For example, it is currently assumed that classical physics is closer to human understanding than quantum mechanics. The concepts of telepresence and telesymbiosis, widely used in Virtual Environments, appeared first in teleoperation [3] by trying to bring such inaccessible worlds in (i.e. to be present in) our real world, or conversely, to carry human beings in (i.e. to be present in) the distant world. Teleoperation platforms for action, perception, and multisensory information processing have been developed [4], [5] to allow us to interact with more and more distant objects, inaccessible to our common senses and cognition.

Three complementary questions summarize the problem addressed under the concept of Presence: “Why do distant, synthetic, cyber, inaccessible worlds seem insufficiently present or real for us? Why, and How can we render them more “present” for our perceptions, actions, and cognition?”

In order to allow reliable concepts and techniques to overcome these problems, we address these questions from the very different points of view of Computer Sciences, particularly Computer Arts and Physics, particularly nanosciences and nanotechnologies.

Section snippets

Why Presence in Computer arts?

In Computer arts, as a result of the extensive developments in computer sound synthesis and computer animation of the last 20 years, we understand today that a complete physical reproduction of reality by means of Computers is unreachable and in addition unsatisfying. Conversely, the purely synthetic imaginary sounds and motions have equally fallen in a similar limit of their acceptability by human perception, cognition and aesthetic judgment. As a haunting underlying, the problem of Presence

Is presence a new problem?

The distinction of what is real and what is non-real is an usual and long lasting question of philosophy as well as of the physics. During ages, several concepts have been confronted [6]:

  • (a)

    from radical idealism, sometimes called “critical idealism”, defended by the neo-kantien philosophers for whom the reality—the noumenon—does not exist in itself, i.e. independently of our representations, having access only to the phenomenon,

  • (b)

    to ontological realism which assumes that science is able to lead to

From teleoperation to synthetic worlds

An explicit problem of Presence occurs whenever human beings manipulate real objects, directly or indirectly through mechanical instruments. The lack of Presence was felt from the moment when the communication between human beings, or between them and the physical universe became deeply mediated. We distinguish two successive steps: the apparition of electrical communication in the teleoperation process and the production of real sensorial data by means of non-real objects (as synthetic images

Restoring the sense of reality

During the huge quantity of experiments that marked the evolution of our instrumental tools described above, we observe that, despite the quest of high visual realism in synthetic images, visual feedback seems not enough to trigger the feeling of Presence. Often, auditory feedback may be better. Introducing, as in conventional interaction, sensory-motor loops that only link action input data to visual or auditory icons as outputs, may enhance this feeling. But, even in the best implementation

Presence in musical playing

To validate the previous analysis in the artistic case, we present an experiment that implements playing on a virtual violin, looking for the minimal conditions to render it as believable as it is real. The used architecture is composed of a 5 DOF high fidelity force feedback device that interacts in real time with a simulated physically based model of the musical instrument.

The used force feedback device is a custom-developed manipulator [11] composed of independent bar keys. Each of them is

Conclusion

This paper presents an approach of the Presence concept, illustrated by two different extreme examples: artistic instrumental playing and nanomanipulation. After a brief review of relevant concepts in philosophy, it concludes that the question is not a new philosophical as well as psycho-cognitive question. It assumes that the novelty is in the possibility to experiment it with our contemporary instrumental background, based on the multisensory VR–MR paradigm, as generic components of an

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