LeoRuffini

Presence is a scientific and technological field focusing on understanding and controlling the experience of being someone, somewhere, with somebody. It aims to produce real-feeling experiences through sensorial augmentation or replacement with digital media. It is also intensely interdisciplinary: advances are needed in human cognition, human-machine interaction and machine intelligence. A simple measure of success in Presence is this: If it feels real then it is Presence.

Interviews carried out by Leo Ruffini of Starlab with Elem3ntal Creative Lab.

Richard Stallman’s crusade began one day at the end of the 1970s when he was working in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). RMS, as he likes to be called, was trying to modify his printer to notify users when the documents would be ready, but he came up against an insurmountable obstacle: he couldn’t access the source code, which was considered information owned by Xerox. Convinced that sharing knowledge is basic to the advancement of the community, he left MIT in 1984 to develop GNU, a free operating system used today by millions of computers, to set up the Free Software Movement and to fight against programming patents.

Published in Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) portal.
By Leo Ruffini / July 2008
Photo and translation of the original written in spanish: UOC

Presence is a scientific and technological field focusing on understanding and controlling the experience of being someone, somewhere, with somebody. It aims to produce real-feeling experiences through sensorial augmentation or replacement with digital media. It is also intensely interdisciplinary: advances are needed in human cognition, human-machine interaction and machine intelligence. A simple measure of success in Presence is this: If it feels real then it is Presence.

Interviews carried out by Leo Ruffini of Starlab with Elem3ntal Creative Lab.

Mel Slater is Professor of Virtual Environments at the Department of Computer Science of the University College London as well as ICREA Research Professor at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Barcelona, Spain. His major research interest is the question of what makes virtual reality work, how is it possible to build virtual environments such that people respond realistically to events within them? What scientific explanations are there of this phenomenon?

What is Presence?
It is difficult to give a definition of Presence. I can tell you more about our approach and then I guess there is an implicit definition in that. When you put on a good Head Mounted Display with a wide field of view and good resolution, or when you step in something like a Cave, it is a qualitatively different experience from watching TV, or a movie, or talking on a mobile phone. The sensory data that is coming to you, or a lot of it, is computer generated, so your visual and auditory systems are being bombarded by sensory data generated from a computer and organized in such a way that it transports your idea of where you are. For instance, you might know that in reality you are standing in a lab in a computer science building, or wherever you were, but your senses are telling you something different, maybe that you are in a forest.