Engineering Presence : an Experimental Strategy

Over the centuries artists have developed a range of techniques for inducing a sense of presence in an audience. The goals of these are however essentially open-ended. The presence engineer, on the other hand aims to use presence for practical applications. After summarizing ways in which presence can be detected and measured this paper places 21 century presence techniques and technologies in the broader context of previous techniques and technologies, which have already proved their effectiveness. Presence technologies are defined as technologies allowing an actor to transmit a signal inducing a sense of presence in an audience. In engineering applications this sense of presence furthers the goals of the actor. An examination of difference techniques and technologies shows that presence can be effectively induced using signals with very low bit rates and in the absence of any form of interactivity. Animal research and literary theory is used to show that the effectiveness with which presence is induced depends on the evocation of pre-existing mental imagery in the mind of the audience. In artistic applications of presence this involves a deliberate simplification and restructuring of the physical world. The paper therefore proposes a four-stage strategy for engineering presence using modern Virtual Environments. The strategy involves simplification of the physical world so as to emphasize aspects of key importance to the engineer, decomposition of complex situations so as to identify simple situations for which the user already possesses adequate mental imagery; identification of cues capable of effectively evoking this imagery, recomposition of complex realities via the creation of sequences of cues capable of generating complex and novel mental imagery. It is argued that these techniques could have useful applications in learning, a prospect currently under exploration in the EU-funded I-learning Project.