SUZUKI Yoiti, TERAMOTO Wataru, YOSHIDA Kazuhiro, ASAI Nobuko, HIDAKA Souta, SAKAMOTO Shuichi, IWAYA Yukio, GYOBA Jiro
IEICE technical report, 111(74) 29-36, May 23, 2011
Recent advancement of information and communication technologies has evoked expectations for more natural and realistic communications. In studies on multimedia/multimodal communications, the enhancement of a sense of presence-a subjective experience of being in one place even when one is physically situated in another-has been the most important issue. Physical factors for high presence and objective measures of sense of presence have been intensively investigated over twenty years, but it is less known yet. In the present study we first discuss the essence of sense of presence based on our recent survey of more than 200 non-researchers. Next, we show spatio-temporal characteristics for vraisemblance, which is the reality or virtuality assumed to link essentially to foreground components in a scene, while contrasting it with the sense of presence, which, theoretically and empirically, has been found to relate dominantly to background components contained in a scene. Lastly we discuss future directions of measurements for higher order states of sensation such as sense of presence and vraisemblance, and its possible contributions to human-machine interfaces, communications, and entertainment technologies.