Special issue: presence

Abstract

This special issue of AI and Society on presence features papers that were presented at the 13th annual International Workshop on Presence, which was held in Edinburgh. These papers represent the wide variety of disciplines that continue to be applied to the study of presence ranging from computer science, to classical studies, psychology, neuroscience and communication. As digital technologies continue their relentless spread to so very many aspects of our everyday lives, the experience of presence is becoming a unifying basis for reasoning about and evaluating these developments. This special issue comprises eight papers that have been grouped into three sections. The first two papers, while being closely related, differ with respect to their treatment of the authenticity of the virtual environments that they describe. The next two papers report studies of social presence. The final tranche of papers address presence in different forms of media. In the first section, the papers examine applications of presence. The paper by Benyon and his colleagues offers an introduction to what they describe as digital tourism. They begin by noting that tourism is a global industry worth billions. Digital tourism is concerned with the use of digital technologies such as augmented reality to enhance the experience of being-there and being-there with other people. The authors offer a number of design scenarios (exemplars) of how this might be implemented. In the first example, the House of Edgar Allen Poe has the tourist experiencing an enhanced visit by way of their mobile phone. The Brick City Tours offers an alternate vision by offering digital enhancement, before, during and after a visit. An interesting feature of the after visit supports being personalised mementoes of the trip. These digital enhancements are deemed to involve the creation of blended spaces, that is, the seamless experience of the real and the virtual—a notion that might have puzzled Descartes. The vision offered by this paper is faced with an interesting and unexpected counterpoint in the next paper—Time.deltaTime. Fredrick’s Time.deltaTime raises a host of issues for presence researchers and those engaged in building digital applications intended to create a sense of being-there. Fredrick’s interest is primarily in the re-creation of places of historic and archaeological interest. Digital technology can be used to create or recreate representations of the historic (e.g. ancient Egypt), culturally significant but physically fragile (Machu Picchu) and the inaccessible (the surface of Mars, the bottom of the Pacific). The implications for tourism, archaeology, education and so forth are significant. However, this unconstrained enthusiasm stands in contrast to the aims of the London Charter which calls for the adoption of international standards for intellectual integrity, transparency, sustainability and access in 3D modelling for cultural heritage. Fredrick, echoing the intent of the London Charter, observes that it is simply too easy, when using software tools, to over-embellish a representation of, say, ancient Pompeii. By way of further example, he notes the many anachronisms and errors in Ubisoft’s best-selling games—Assassin’s Creed—which is set in what purports to be an historic Venice. From their reconstruction of the Piazza and Basilica, San Marco Fredrick suggests that the designers may not have read the London Charter. The sheer P. Turner (&) School of Computing, Edinburgh Napier University, 10 Colinton Road, Edinburgh Eh10 5DT, Scotland, UK e-mail: p.turner@napier.ac.uk