Being There & Being With: The Philosophical and Cognitive Notions of Presence and Embodiment in Virtual Instruments

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-à-vis situation in which humans are interacting with a vis-à-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). 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. 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.