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Intersubjectivity and social
presence
Francesca Morganti, PhD
University of Lugano, Switzerland
Istituto Auxologico Italiano, Milano - Italy
Virtual spaces
• People access a variety of existing scenarios on the
web designed for communication and cooperation.
• If based on 3D technologies they provide users with
a variety of interconnected places (virtual
environments) through which people navigate and
carry on tasks
• People socially interact through their embodiments,
named avatars
• Generally, each virtual environment can provide
access to a number of tools, awareness of on-going
events and can also encourage open communication
and cooperation with other occupants
Shared spaces
• Multi-agent VR environments are not only
composed of multiple actors but also, and especially,
of multiple viewpoints about reality
• Managing the possibility of combining multiple
perspectives multi-user VE provide a sense of
mutual awareness among users when they are
involved in an interaction
• A new chance to shed light to this perspective is
based on the concept of presence and social
presence
A backward step: Telepresence
• The term presence derives from “telepresence” and refers to
the phenomenon that a human operator develops being
physically present in a remote location through interaction
with a technological interface (Minsky, 1980).
• The term “telepresence” is used when the virtual experience
dominates the real world experience and describes the
feeling of being in the environment generated by the
technology, rather than in the surrounding physical
environment (Steuer, 1992).
The sense of presence
“Presence is a psychological state or a subjective perception in
which the participant, although working with an instrument,
fails to understand the role of technology in his experience.
Although the subject might assert (except in extreme cases)
that he is using technology, up to a certain point, or a certain
degree, the subject gets involved in the task, in objects,
entities and event perception, as if technology was not
present” (Lombard, 2000)
• Presence is widely accepted as the key element to consider in
any research involving human interaction with interactive
technologies and by many researchers as the essence of any
experience in a virtual reality environment.
• The concept of presence is very broad and has been
developed over the past decade since its original description.
Two ways to be present ?
• The VR systems comprise two main
components:
▫ a technological one
▫ one related to psychological experience
• The different relevance given to each component
produced two different but coexisting
perspectives on presence:
▫ the mediated presence perspective
▫ the experiential presence perspective
(Coelho, Tichon, Hine, Wallis, Riva, 2006)
Mediated/experiential presence
• Mediated presence:
▫ VR system is a a collection of specific technological tools, the interaction with
which needs to be explained in terms of presence.
▫ The sense of presence is a function of the experience of a given medium
Lombard 2000
Schubert, Friedmann & Regenbrecht, 1999
Slater & Wilbur, 1997
• Experiential presence:
▫ Presence is a cognitive phenomenon
▫ The sense of presence evolves through the interplay between our biological
and cultural inheritance, whose main function is the control of human
activity
Biocca, 2001
Carassa, Morganti, Tirassa, 2004; 2005
IJsselstein, 2002
Mantovani, Riva, 1999; 2001
Riva, Waterworth & Waterworth, 2004
The emergence of CVE
• The recent evolution of technology has focused on the design and
development of collaborative virtual environments (CVEs)
• CVEs are virtual arenas within which people are able to meet,
communicate and cooperate by interacting synchronously with each
other
• Interaction and cooperation are allowed by virtual reality software,
even while users are physically located in different places over the
world
• Several authors attribute to this kind of media the function to create
the possibility to collapse space and time, in order to provide not
only the limited illusion of ‘being there’ but also of ‘being together
with other people’ (Biocca, Kim, Levy, 1995)
• Like the feeling of being there in a computer-simulated environment
Social presence
• The sense of social presence is distinguished by the
following five common features:
▫ a shared sense of space (the illusion of being located in the
same place with other users)
▫ a shared sense of “co-existence” (supported by introduction
of virtual representation of self and others: avatars of
participants)
▫ a shared sense of time (by providing real-time interaction
not only with the environment but also with other users)
▫ a way to communicate (writing, talking and acting with
other users)
▫ a way to share (the possibility of sharing knowledge and
“digital objects”, interacting within the environment)
Singhal and Zyda (1999)
Co-presence
• The concept of social presence mostly derived from the
term co-presence originated in the work of Goffman:
▫ co-presence existed when people reported that they were
actively perceiving others and felt that others were actively
perceiving them
“co-presence renders persons uniquely accessible,
available, and subject to one another” (Goffman, 1963, p.
22).
Co-presence in this sense solely refers to a psychological
connection to and with another person.
It requires that interactants feel they are able to perceive
their interaction partner and that their interaction
partner actively perceives them
What social presence afford?
• Social presence has been frequently invoked to evaluate
people’s ability to connect via telecommunication
systems (Rice, 1993; Short et al., 1976; Walther, 1996)
• Short et al., (1976) defined social presence as “the degree
of salience of the other person in the interaction and the
consequent salience of the interpersonal relationships”
There is large evidence that the efficacy of computer based
learning systems and their productive performance in
teleconferencing and collaborative virtual environments
are largely based on the quality of the social presence
they afford.
How to define, measure, and design social presence has
become one of the most challenging problems in
communication theory and in the psychological
definition of technology-enhanced involvement
Up to now, measures of social presence have been shown
to relate more to the user’s perception of a medium’s
ability to provide salience of another as opposed to
measuring the actual perceived salience of another
person
It emerges the necessity to investigate how humans are
able to project “a sense of self” through the resources
and the limitations of a medium using virtual reality
technologies as possible communication and cooperation
scenario (Morganti, Riva 2006)
Interpersonal relationship
Characterizing social presence as the degree of “salience of
the interpersonal relationship” it will be necessary to
define the degree of psychological involvement with the
other
On one side, Rice claims that social presence “is
fundamentally related to two social psychology concepts;
intimacy and immediacy” (Rice, 1993, p. 72)
On the other side it is possible to define social presence
starting from the “theory of mind” assumption: it
involves a degree of mutual awareness - social presence
results when an user is aware of the mediated other, and
the other is contemporaneously aware of the user
(Heeter, 1992)
To access another intelligence
• One of the key defining element of social presence is the
sense that one has “access to another’s intelligence”
(Biocca, 1997)
• Social presence is activated as soon as a user believes
that an entity of the environment displays some minimal
intelligence in its reactions to the environment and to
the user
• The key issue for social presence becomes the “moment-
by-moment awareness” of the co-existence of another
sentient being, accompanied by a sense of engagement
with the other (Biocca, Harms, Gregg, 2001)
The “moment by moment” awareness
• The ability to perceive the others; it does not imply that
one understands what they believe or want
• The ability to share attention; it is out in the open for
subjects A and B that one of them (or both of them)
attend to object X
• The ability to represent the intentions of others; being
able to understand the objective that may lie behind
another individual’s behaviour
The ability to perceive the virtual
others
• Can user’s feel the same level of social presence with virtual bodies
that appear less-human (anthropomorphic) as compared to virtual
bodies that conform more closely to the shape of the human body?
• How the visual representations of computerized others influence
person perception?
• When the bodily cues are computer generated and not natural, will
people rely on them for person perception and social judgment or
ignore them because they are completely fabricated and, therefore,
untrustworthy?
The disembodied others encountered in mediated environments may
not provide all (or even any) of the traditional cues that people have
come to rely on for perceiving others. At the same time, virtual
environments may provide various kinds of new, dramatic
embodiment cues that might enhance interpersonal interaction.
• When the virtual human appeared non-
anthropomorphic, people feel they had less access to
another mind
• They also feel less social presence that is they felt that
the medium was less able to support a social interaction.
• People feel a reduced sense of presence in the place
where the social interaction occurred
Users may feel less socially comfortable with forms of the
body that deviated too much from what they experience
in the physical world
This raises the question of why the anthropomorphism of
the user’s virtual image influence not only the user’s
judgment of co-presence with the other, but also their
judgment of the appropriateness of the medium for
social interaction and the users sense of presence in the
place.
Shared attention in VR
• Situation awareness does not consist therefore of a collection of
“objective” information relative to "how things are" in the
environment, but rather it consists of multiple situated scenarios
shaped by meanings which participants attribute to the current
situation
• We can recognize different layers of situation awareness, from the
most superficial which gives us information about the participants
to the environment, to the deeper one, which introduces a plurality
of perspectives on the virtual space
How the technological systems have to be able to support a set of
social behaviors?
WISIWYS vs WISIWYD design frameworks
• WYSIWIS systems provide participants with information about the space in which other
participants are moving, so that a user can know in every moment where other users are
and what the focus of their attention is.
▫ The information provided by WYSIWIS systems is generally of a graphic type, and is
integrated into the system automatically, without distracting the attention of the participants.
▫ The effectiveness of these tools diminishes with increase in the shared space visible to each
user, and with increase in the complexity of actions permitted to participants by the system
• WYSIWID systems have three fundamental parts:
▫ Elements of knowledge that analyzes the workspace, identifying what type of information the
users in the shared space are exchanging
▫ Process of maintaining awareness that regards the information obtained from the first part,
and indicates in which way the information must be presented to the users
▫ Uses of workspace awareness that consists of a process, which helps the designers to
understand the situations by means of an analysis of the interactions developing in the
groupware
(In spite of the variety of the awareness widgets introduced, the WYSIWID system does not
provide cues to understand the intentions of the other participants)
A scenario design that is able to provide not only information about the users’ placement in
the environment, but also about the main actions they undertake will better support social
presence
(Gutwin and Greenberg, 1998; Cottone, Mantovani, 2003 )
Intentionality in VR
By convention, a virtual human controlled by a human in
real time is labeled “avatar,” but it would be labeled an
“agent” if an artificial intelligence or a computer
controlled it
In the networked social places inhabited by virtual
humans, the user may feel some level of connection with
those he/she encounters while at the same time
automatically constructing a representation of the other.
This representation is extended and clarified as the user
works to understand and predict the intentions, and
future behaviors, of the virtual other
• Does it matter if the mind controlling the virtual human
body is human, or is it enough to feel a connection to
another mind whether it is human or artificial?
• When behavior and embodiment is the same, in a very short
interaction users may feel equally present with what they know to be
artificial agents as they do with human avatars
• In very simplified interactions users felt they had access to another
mind and that the mind was attending to them (copresence) whether
it was an agent or avatar.
People respond to computers in ways that are very similar to the ways
they respond to other humans (Reeves and Nass, 1996)
In more complex interactions there are significant differences in users
perception of the medium’s ability to provide a connection to another
mind (social presence), and there are significant differences in the
extent to which people felt physically present in the virtual world
(presence as transportation)
Final remarks
Social presence phenomenon give us an example of
“mirroring” even where some sensorial information cues
are not directly avaliable in the interaction scenario.
Social presence derives from human ability to create sense
in interaction more than in technology’s ability to
provide salience of others
Even if technology “fails” in provide users with salient
information in interaction humans are cognitively able to
fill this gap.
Thank You for your attention
francesca.morganti@lu.unisi.ch
affective attentional intentional
subject A intends to do X, does X (intentionally), perceives X, believes X,
individual
desires X, etc.
affective attentional intentional
subject A subject A subject A
perceives that perceives that perceives that
perceived
subject B has subject B attends subject B intends
emotion X to object X to do X, etc.
subject A subject A
has attends to it is out in the it is out in the it is out in the
emotion X object X open for subjects open for subjects open for subjects
interpersonal A and B that one A and B that one A and B that one
shared
of them (or both of them (or both of of them (or both
of them) has them) attend to of them) intends
emotion E object X to do X, etc.
A and B are A and B are jointly A and B are
jointly committed committed to jointly committed
joint
to have emotion attend to object X to intend X, do X,
X (as a body) (as a body) etc. (as a body)
