PRESENCE: the sense of believability of inaccessible worlds

Abstract

With the development of communication methods and devices, it became possible to perform actions more and more distant from the task spaces. These new tools raise today the question of Presence of distant spaces with a growing accuracy. In a first part, we show that the distance between the manipulation space and the task space, in a teleoperation activity, points to different meanings. However, the same need for a strong Presence of the task space raises, whatever the distance between these spaces is. We then discuss the notion of Presence as a cross-point between technological and scientific disciplines, and propose some general idea that may reinforce it. In a second part, we illustrate the previous ideas with the example of manipulation of nano-objects. We show how it is possible to enhance dramatically the feeling of Presence of the nano-objects to be perceived and manipulated, by adding haptic bi-directional transducers to the visual and acoustical sensors used today. By the end, we defend the idea that the feeling of Being there is deeply dependent on multisensoriality.