Virtual reality systems have reached a certain level of maturity in terms of visual and aural quality, but the sense of presence also requires believably behaving environment. A new field of adding intelligence into virtual environments is emerging. We describe shortly the field of virtual reality, and how AI can be applied there. We outline the possibilities of using AI to enhance existing app...

The present paper is a review of the role of individual factors in Spatial Presence. If Spatial Presence is a subjective mental phenomenon psychological factors must have an important role on it. Our review shows that, even though many authors claim about the need for a better understanding about this relation, empirical evidence is still very limited. Personality-related factors as absorption,...

Psychological approaches to the study of presence are limited, and those with experimental support even more limited. This work is an attempt to highlight the human factors involved which may lead to a better understanding of individual differences in relation to the experience of presence. We investigated the relationship between four cognitive factors namely absorption, creative imagination, ...

We need to know the real intentions of participants that are not expressed by verbal languages This means that not only verbal information but also non-verbal information (i e , gestures, facial expression, eyes of participant, etc.) is a very important factor We proposed and implemented MAJIC, a multi-party videoconferencing system that enables eye contact among people in remote places, with l...

Presence and copresence have been key goals of researchers and developers of shared virtual environments. Much research has assumed that the two reinforce each other; that is, an enhanced sense of presence enhances copresence and vice versa. In this essay we question this assumption, and provide some examples in which users experience high presence and low copresence and the opposite. Although ...

Human movement in virtual environments (VEs) is a largely unstudied area, and there are no well-established methods of measuring it in VEs. Consequently, it is unclear how movement affects the experiential side of VEs. We introduce a novel method of measuring and modelling human movement. A specific information entropy-based modelling method enabled us to identify different movement patterns an...

The analysis of agency, a very close concept to presence, is of great help for acquiring insights into how the sense of presence is acquired in the developing child and also about the experience of presence itself. Empirical evidence coming from Cognitive Developmental Research together with the positive outcome of people with autism (who are not generally able to act “as if”) when participatin...

Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) that can be simultaneously shared by a number of participants located in different geographical locations, provide new possibilities for communication and collaboration, with a lot of potential for the way we work and exchange information. However, in order for such systems to be successful they need to provide the participants with a compelling experie...

In modern societies people tend to spend more time in front of computer screens than outdoors. Along with an increasing degree of realism displayed in digital environments, simulated weather appears more and more realistic and more often implemented in digital environments. Research has found that the actual weather influences behavior and mood. In this paper we experimentally examine the effec...

We present here a system for controlling the eye gaze of a virtual embodied conversational agent able to perceive the physical environment in which it interacts. This system is inspired by known components of human visual attention system and reproduces its limitations in terms of visual acuity, sensitivity to movement, limitations of short-memory and object pursuit. The aim of this coupling be...