PRESENCE 2005
The 8th Annual International Workshop on Presence

September 21-23
London

Conference Format & Program

Like the earlier workshops, PRESENCE 2005 will have an interactive format in which all participants (attendees, presenters, invited speakers) attend each of the sessions as well as several social events, allowing participants to exchange ideas and build knowledge together as the conference progresses.

PROVISIONAL CONFERENCE PROGRAM
(as of August 29)

OVERVIEW

DAY 1: Wednesday 21st September

DAY 2: Thursday 22nd September

DAY 3: Friday 23rd September


DAY 1: Wednesday 21st September

08.30-09.30 Registration

Introductory Session

09.30-09.40 Welcome to the Conference
Mel Slater, Conference Chair
Matthew Lombard, President, ISPR
   
09.40-09.50 Welcome to University College London
Anthony Finkelstein, Head of Department of Computer Science, UCL
   
09.50-10.00 Presence and Interaction in Mixed-Reality Environments (Presence II), IST Future Emerging Technologies
Walter Van De Velde, European Commission

 

Keynote Talk 1

Chair: Gert Pfurtscheller, Laboratory of Brain-Computer Interfaces, Institute for Computer Graphics and Vision, Graz University of Technology, Austria

10.00-11.00 Experimenting with Ada: Towards Collective Mixed-reality Environments
  Paul F.M.J. Verschure, Institute of Neuroinformatics, University & Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zuric
   
  We have constructed a shared mixed reality environment that can support simultaneous interaction with dozens of humans. This space, called Ada, was presented at the Swiss national exhibition Expo.02 and was visited by 553.700 people during the 6 months of this event. Ada raises a number of questions concerning the methods and technologies that facilitate the construction of real-world systems consisting of very dense sensor and effector networks, and the approaches that allow for effective interactions between such a space and its visitors. Ada's design was based on a neuromorphic approach where the artefact itself was conceived as a sentient organism, its central control systems were based on large-scale neuronal models and its modes of interaction as behaviours subserving specific allocentric needs. In this presentation I will describe the key components of Ada and present a quantitative and qualitative analysis of its performance and impact on human behaviour and experience.

 

11.00-11.30 BREAK

 

Session 1: Interacting with a Brain

Chair: Edwin Blake, Department of Computer Science, University of Cape Town, South Africa

11.30-12.00 An Investigation of Collective Human Interaction with a Large-scale, Mixed-reality Space
Kynan Eng1, Matti Mintz2, and Paul F.M.J. Verschure1
1
Institute of Neuroinformatics, University/ETH Zurich, Switzerland
2 Department of Psychology, Tel-Aviv University, Israel
   
12.00-12.30 Walking from Thoughts: Not the Muscles are Crucial, But the Brain Waves!
Robert Leeb1Claudia Keinrath1,   Doron Friedman2, Christoph Guger3Christa Neuper1,4, Maia Garau2Angus Antley2, Anthony Steed2, Mel Slater2 and Gert Pfurtscheller1,5
1
Laboratory of Brain-Computer Interfaces, Institute for Computer Graphics and Vision, Graz University of Technology, Austria
2 Department of Computer Science, University College London, United Kingdom
3 g.tec - Guger Technologies OEG, Austria
4 Department of Psychology, University of Graz, , Austria
5 Ludwig-Boltzmann Institut für medizinische Informatik und Neuroinformatik, Graz University of Technology, Austria
   
12.30-12.45 Reliving VE Day with Schemata Activation
Phil Turner1, Susan Turner1, and Dimitrios Tzovaras2
1
School of Computing, Napier University, UK
2 Informatics and Telematics Institiute, Thermi-Thessaloniki, Greece

 

12.45-13.45 LUNCH

 

13.45-15.45 DISPLAYED POSTER SESSION and DEMONSTRATIONS

 

Session 2: Body, Space and Motion

Chair: Paul F.M.J. Verschure, Institute of Neuroinformatics University/ETH Zürich

15.45-16.15 Is this My Hand I see before me? The Rubber Hand Illusion in Reality, Virtual Reality and Mixed Reality
Wijnand IJsselsteijn, Yvonne de Kort, and Antal Haans
Human-Technology Interaction Group, Department of Technology Management, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
   
16.15-16.30 Influence of Auditory Cues on the Visually Induced Self-Motion Illusion (Circular Vection) in Virtual Reality
Bernhard Riecke, Jörg Schulte-Pelkum, Franck Caniard, & Heinrich H.Bülthoff
Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany
   
16.30-17.00 Neural Processing of Spatial Information: What we know about place cells and what they can tell us about presence
Jorge Brotons1, Shane O'Mara2 and Mavi Sanchez-Vives1
1 Instituto de Neurociencias de Alicante, Universidad Miguel Hernandez-CSIC, Spain
2 Institute of Neuroscience, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

 

17.00-17.30 BREAK

 

Session 3: Interaction with Avatars

Chair: Doron Friedman, Department of Computer Science, University College London, UK

17.30-18.00 The Effect of Behavioral Realism and Form Realism of Real-Time Avatar Faces on Verbal Disclosure, Nonverbal Disclosure, Emotion Recognition, and Copresence in Dyadic Interaction
Jeremy N. Bailenson1, Nick Yee1, Dan Merget2, and Ralph Schroeder3
1
Department of Communication, Stanford University, USA
2 Department of Computer Science, Stanford University, USA
3 Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, UK
   
18.00-18.30 BASIC: A Believable, Adaptable, Socially Intelligent Character for Social Presence
Daniela Romano, Gary Sheppard, James Hall, Adam Miller, Zhinan Ma
Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield, UK
   
18.30-18.45 Virtual Encounters. Creating Social Presence in Net-based Collaborations
Sabine Rüggenberg, Gary Bente, and Nicole C. Krämer
Department of Psychology, University of Cologne, Germany
   
18.45-19.00 Non-verbal Communication for Correlational Characters
Marco Gillies and Mel Slater
Department of Computer Science, University College London, UK

 

19.00- THE i2 MEDIA RECEPTION
kindly sponsored by

i2 media research ltd.
Department of Psychology, Goldsmiths College, University of London

 


DAY 2: Thursday 22nd September

Keynote Talk 2

Chair: Matthew Lombard, Mass Media & Communication, Temple University, USA

09.00-10.00 Issues of Law and Ethics in the Design and Use of Virtual Environments
Woodrow Barfield, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA
   
  Recent advances in the technologies associated with wearable computing, virtual environments, and computer-mediated realities has led to interesting legal, policy, and ethical issues and concerns. We are now at the stage in technological development where we can begin to build on-line virtual or computer-mediated communities, and where people can spend significant amounts of time. In these worlds it is pertinent to ask, should there be any rules, laws, policies, or ethics to govern human interactions? For example, what will happen when the real and virtual merge and become indistinguishable, or when cyberspace spills out into a computer-mediated reality? What will be the role, if any, of the government in regulating and setting policy for conduct in virtual communities or computer-mediated spaces, and what will be the role for the Courts in interpreting and carrying out the law? Will the traditional roles and functions performed by the government and courts in real-world environments, by analogy be transferred to virtual communities? Can cyberlaw reach outside someone's electric eyeglasses and into the real world that he or she is computationally mediating? Should virtual space be treated like real space? Should real space be treated like virtual space? Should existing property, contract, tort, and criminal law wash across the dissolved boundaries of computer-mediated perception? And should one even be able to own a piece of virtual space? The above set of questions are timely and interesting given current technological developments in virtual and computer mediated reality displays, and law scholars have already begun the discussion of whether interactions in virtual space should be governed in a similar manner as real space, but the results to date are inconclusive. However, since governmental bodies are already prominent in creating statutes to govern on-line electronic commerce, it may not be much of a leap to assume that such bodies may also see it within their province to begin the active process of codifying and creating policy for the full range of human activities occurring in virtual environments. This talk will review basic issues of law for virtual environments and will attempt to serve as a warning bell for the "presence" community that now is the time for the community to get involved in setting the policy that will guide interactions in virtual environments.

 

Session 4: Meta Presence

Chair: Cristina Botella Arbona, Universitat Jaume I, Spain

10.00-10.30 Sharing and Analysing Presence Experiments Data
Doron Friedman1, Andrea Brogni1, Angus Antley1, Christoph Guger2 and Mel Slater1
1
Department of Computer Science, University College London, UK
2 g.tec - Guger Technologies OEG, Austria
   
10.30-10.45 The Big Picture: Gaining Perspective by Examining Patterns in the (Tele)Presence Literature
Matthew Lombard and Matthew T. Jones
Mass Media & Communication, Temple University, USA
   
10.45-11.00 Are we Persuaded by Feeling “Part of the Action”? Exploring the Similarities between the Transportation Imagery Model and Presence
Cheryl Campanella Bracken
Department of Communication, Cleveland State University, USA

 

11.00-11.30 BREAK

 

Session 5: Individual and Cultural Effects

Chair: Frank Biocca, Telecommunications, Information Studies and Media Communication Arts and Sciences, Michigan State University, USA

11.30-12.00 Individual Differences in the Sense of Presence
Ivan Alsina Jurnet, Cristina Carvallo Beciu, and José Gutiérrez Maldonado
Grupo de investigación sobre aplicaciones de la realidad virtual en Psicología clínica, University of Barcelona, Spain
   
12.00-12.30 The Impact of Personality Factors on the Experience of Spatial Presence
Ana Sacau1, Jari Laarni2, Niklas Ravaja2, and Tilo Hartmann3 
1 University Fernando Pessoa, Portugal
2 Helsinki School of Economics, Finland
3 Department of Journalism and Communication Research, Hanover University of Music and Drama, Germany
   
12.30-13.00 Culture Matters - A Study on Presence in an Interactive Movie
Jun Hu and Christoph Bartneck
Department of Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands

 

13.00-14.00 LUNCH

 

14.00-15.00 DISPLAYED POSTER SESSION and DEMONSTRATIONS

 

Session 6: Talking Faces and Social Collaboration

Chair: Jonathan Freeman, Department of Psychology (i2 media research), Goldsmiths College, University of London

15.00-15.30 The Influence of Lip Animation on the Perception of Speech in Virtual Environments
Edwin Blake and Johan Verwey 
Department of Computer Science, University of Cape Town, South Africa
   
15.30-16.00 Providing High Social Presence for Mobile Systems via an Unobtrusive Face Capture System
Miguel A. Figueroa-Villanueva1, Frank A. Biocca2Chandan K. Reddy1, Jannick P. Rolland3, and George C. Stockman1
1
 Computer Science and Engineering Department, Michigan State University East Lansing, USA
2 Department of Telecommunications, Michigan State University East Lansing, USA
3 School of Optics University of Central Florida Orlando, USA
   
16.00-16.30 A Study of Influential Factors on Effective Closely-Coupled Collaboration based on single user perceptions
Oliver Otto, David J. Roberts, and Robin Wolff 
The Centre for Virtual Environments, University of Salford, UK
   
16.30-17.00 Social Presence in Two- and Three-dimensional Videoconferencing
Joerg Hauber1Holger Regenbrecht2 Aimee Hills2 Andrew Cockburn1 and Mark Billinghurst1
1
University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand
2 University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

 

17.00-17.30 BREAK

 

Session 7: Presence Theory and Experimentation

Chair: Miriam Reiner, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology Department of Education in Technology and Science Haifa, 32000, Israel

17.30-18.00 Agency and Presence: a Common Dependence on Subjectivity?
Gerardo Herrera1, Rita Jordan2 and Lucía Vera1
1
Autism & Learning Difficulties Group, Robotics Institute, University of Valencia, Spain
2 School of Education, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom
   
18.00-18.30 When Presence and Emotion are Related and When They are Not
Jonathan Freeman1, Jane Lessiter1, Katherine Pugh1 and Ed Keogh2
1 Department of Psychology (i2 media research), Goldsmiths College, University of London
2 Department of Psychology, University of Bath
   
18.30-18.45 Schemata, Narrative and Presence
Dan Pinchbeck and Brett Stevens
Department of Creative Technologies, University of Portsmouth, UK
   
18.45-19.00 The Role of Content Preference on Thematic Priming in Virtual Presence
Ilda Ladeira2, David Nunez1 and Edwin Blake2
1
Department of Psychology, University of Cape Town, South Africa
2 Department of Computer Science, University of Cape Town, South Africa

 

19.30 CONFERENCE DINNER at Imperial Chinese Restaurant
  After dinner speaker: Loretta Anania, European Commission

 


DAY 3: Friday 23rd September

Keynote Talk 3

Chair: Anthony Steed, Department of Computer Science, University College London, UK

09.00-10.00 Presence for Sale: The Competitive Edge of Using VR
Carolina Cruz Niera, Virtual Reality Applications Center, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, USA

Virtual reality is no longer a discipline exclusive to academics and researchers. Industry has realized the potential of this technology to obtain a competitive edge on the race to place products in the market. Virtual reality offers companies the ability to design, analyze, evaluate, and deploy a new product entirely within a digital world. This digital world provides a powerful communication tool in which designers, engineers, marketers, and customers can experience the product in the context pertinent to each one of them. They can carry discussions and understand each other through the visual, auditory, and even haptic product representations. Through VR, potential product flaws can be identified earlier, customers' preferences can be studied, and bolder designs can be addressed. The ability to bring humans into a digital world that "looks and feels real" and that contains an augmented reality of the product and its operation environment opens new and unexplored opportunities to leverage industry competitive expertise. This talk will review the presenter's experiences on taking VR out of the research area into the commercial world, focusing on a range of experiments conducted to characterize the critical elements of VR as a working environment for commercial products. The talk will continue with a discussion on the business value of VR and the presentation of several success stories on current commercial uses of this technology. The talk will end with a look into the future trends and expectations of VR in industry.

 

Session 8: Interactivity and Usability - Theory and Practice

Chair: Anna Spagnolli, University of Padua, Italy

10.00-10.30 Towards a Model for a Virtual Reality Experience: The Virtual Subjectiveness
Narcís Parés and Roc Parés
Experimentation on Interactive Communication Audiovisual Institute, Universitat Pompeu Fabra Barcelona, Spain
   
10.30-11.00 A Virtual Playground for the Study of the Role of Interactivity in Virtual Learning Environments
Maria Roussou and Mel Slater
Department of Computer Science, University College London, UK
   
11.00-11.15 Analysis of Subject Behavior in a Virtual Reality User Study
Jurgen P. Schulze1, Andrew S. Forsberg1, and Mel Slater2
1
Department of Computer Science, Brown University, USA
2 Department of Computer Science, University College London, UK
   
11.15-11.30 Exploring the Relationships Between the Usability of a Medium and the Sense of Spatial Presence Perceived by the User
Andreas Nosper1, Katharina-Maria Behr1, Tilo Hartmann1 and Peter Vorderer2
1 Department of Journalism and Communication Research, Hanover University of Music and Drama, Germany
2 Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California, Los Angeles USA

 

11.30-12.00 BREAK

 

Session 9: Multimodal Presence

Chair: Mavi Sanchez-Vives, Instituto de Neurociencias de Alicante, Universidad Miguel Hernandez-CSIC, Spain

12.00-12.30 Multi-Modal Stimulation, Response Time and Presence
David Hecht1, Miriam Reiner1, and Gad Halevy2
1
Technion - Israel Institute of Technology Department of Education in Technology and Science Haifa, 32000, Israel
2 The University of Haifa Haifa, 31905, Israel
   
12.30-13.00 A Comparison of the Effect that the Visual and Haptic Problems Associated with Touching a Projection Augmented Model Have on Object-presence
Emily Bennett and Brett Stevens
Department of Information Systems and Computer Applications, University of Portsmouth, UK
   
13.00-13.15 Difficulties Using Passive Haptic Augmentation in the Interaction within a Virtual Environment.
R. Viciana-Abad, A. Reyes-Lecuona, F.J. Cañadas-Quesada
Department of Electronic Technology, University of Málaga, Spain
   
13.15-13.30 The Value of Reaction-Time Measures in Presence Research: Empirical Findings and Future Perspectives
Christoph Klimmt1, Tilo Hartmann1, Andre Gysbers1, and  Peter Vorderer2
1
Department of Journalism & Communication Research, Hanover University of Music and Drama, Germany
2 Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA

 

13.30-14.30 LUNCH
  ISPR Board Meeting (location to be announced)

 

14.30-15.00 DISPLAYED POSTER SESSION and DEMONSTRATIONS

 

Session 10: Presence: Past, Present, and Future (The OMNIPRES Project)

Chair: TBA

15.00-16.30 The panel will take a bird's eye view of the field, overview the current Presence initiative, and look ahead towards new Presence research. With views directed towards the past, present, and future of presence research, the panel will outline key presence research accomplishments, current issues, and suggest possible trends and recurring themes. The panelists will seek to engage the audience in a discussion of the current state and direction of presence research.

Presence Past 
Wijnand IJsselsteijn
Human-Technology Interaction Group, Department of Technology Management, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands

Presence Present 
Jonathan Freeman
Department of Psychology (i2 media research), Goldsmiths College, University of London

Presence Future 
Frank Biocca
Telecommunications, Information Studies and Media Communication Arts and Sciences, Michigan State University, USA

 

16.30-17.00 BREAK

 

Session 11: Therapy

Chair: Daniela Romano, Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield, UK

17.00-17.30 Play Therapy Utilizing the Sony Eye Toy
Eva Petersson and Anthony Brooks 
Aalborg University Esbjerg, Denmark
   
17.30-17.45 An Augmented Reality System for the Treatment of Acrophobia
M. C. Juan1, D. Pérez1, D. Tomás1, B. Rey1, M. Alcañiz1, C. Botella2 and C. Baños3
1
MedICLab, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Spain
2 Departamento de Psicología Básica y Psicobiología (UJI), Spain
3 Universidad de Valencia, Spain
   
17.45-18.00 Using Virtual Reality to Provide Nutritional Support to HIV+ Women
Sarah Brown1David Nunez2 and Edwin Blake1
1 Department of Computer Science, University of Cape Town, South Africa
2 Department of Psychology, University of Cape Town, South Africa

 

Session 12: Gaming and Connected Presence

Chair: Cheryl Campanella Bracken, Cleveland State University, USA

18.00-18.30 Spatial Presence and Emotions during Video Game Playing: Does it Matter with Whom You Play?
Niklas Ravaja1, Timo Saari1, Marko Turpeinen2 Jari Laarni1, Mikko Salminen1, and Matias Kivikangas1
1
M.I.N.D. Lab/CKIR, Helsinki School of Economics, Finland
2 Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, Finland
   
18.30-18.45 Learning, Experience and Cognitive Factors in the Presence Experiences of Gamers: An Exploratory Relational Study
David Nunez1 and Edwin Blake2
1
Department of Psychology, University of Cape Town, South Africa
2 Department of Computer Science, University of Cape Town, South Africa
   
18.45-19.00 Being There Together and the Future of Connected Presence
Ralph Schroeder
Oxford Internet Institute, UK

 

Conference Close

19.00 Closing Remarks
   
19.15 Pub

 


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