~Proceedings ICMCISMCI2014 14-20 September 2014, Athens, Greece
Being There & Being With:
The Philosophical and Cognitive Notions of Presence and
Embodiment in Virtual Instruments
Annie Luciani
ACROE & Laboratoire ICA
Ministere de la Culture et de la Communication
Institut Polytechnique de Grenoble
Annie.Luciani@imag.fr
ABSTRACT
In this paper, we will discuss two main concepts, associated with the development of Virtual Worlds, which are
"Presence" and "Embodiment". Presence is stamped as
the sense of "Being there", that has to be reconstructed in
Local world to render Distant Worlds accessible by networked or mediated communications. "Embodiment"
could be the property of a Virtual entity to be incorporated by human as a second nature. We will show then,
how (1) the first situation can be seen as a definition of
"immateriality" and its correlative concept of infinity, (2)
the second situation can be seen as a definition of "tangibility" with its correlative concept of instrumental embodiment. After exploring the complementary properties
of these situations in detail, we will focus on the second
one, identified as "the instrumental situation". We will
propose some of its relevant properties, those that are
able to trigger the sense of embodiment, as the main
property supported in the real physical world by the feature of "tangibility". Consequently, we estimate that
"embodiment" is more important than the tangibility in
itself and we examine some criteria able to help us to
recreate them in digital representations.
1. HUMAN-WORLD FUNCTIONNAL RELATIONSHIPS
Let start with a rough look at the diversity of the tasks
humans can perform when they interact sensorially, cognitively and physically with the real world. We may observe that they could be represented along an axis putting
the emphasis on two complementary situations (Figure
1):
- The immersive situation, in which humans are at the
center of a surrounding world, such as when we are
exploring large landscapes, mainly through exteroceptive sensory channels such as vision and audition,
(Figure 1 on the left of the horizontal axis)
- The vis-a-vis situation in which humans are interacting
with a vis-a-vis objects, in hand, supported by physical contacts and interactions through the propriotactilo-kinesthetic sensory-motor modality, such as
haptic, tactile and gestural interactions (Figure 1 on
the right of the horizontal axis).
Copyright: C 2014 First author et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the.eai, 4 L n. e 3, Q
iiwormd, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction
The path from the first to the second (and vice-versa),
that is a usual daily experience, is not so trivial to analyze
and implies deep transformations in the cognitive humanworld relationship..T........:a... \;.........F.....
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Figure 1. From Immersive to the embodied instrument:
a bilateral complex cognitive process.
We propose first an exercise that consists in a course
along this path from the left side to the right side in order
to bring out some relevant features of the complexity of
the cognitive processes going from the sense of "being
there" to the sense of "being with", and vice-versa.
1.1 Being there?
On the left part of the scale axis, the concept of immersive environments (Figure 2), is placed, based on large
spatial spaces in which spatial properties are essential:
sizes, scales, large free body motion, etc. leading to body
oriented VR platforms. The main task characterizing such
situations are environment exploration, including localization, navigation, path finding.
The aim is to be able to perform the task of exploration of
a "landscape" as well as possible, as immersed within
them (landscape, cities, houses, other bodies). The basic
principles are: free motion as much as possible (position
changing) in a 3D space, no occlusion for these free motion and the perceived results, free focus of observation
(scale changing), knowing where we are (self localization). The concerned perceptual channels are visual
and/or acoustical via 3D sounds.
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