Do we have a “need for presence” online?: Presence Live conference at Temple

A conference attendee inside Temple’s Virtual  Environment and Postural Orientation (VEPO) Lab. Photo by Ryan Geffert.

You know that feeling when you’re Skyping with someone and it feels like that person is actually sitting across the table from you rather than being miles away? Do some people have a special tendency, or even a need for that?

That was part of the discussion at last weekend’s Presence Live 2012 conference, during which academics from all over the world converged at Temple University to talk telepresence, or ‘presence,’ for short.

What is presence? It’s technology that makes us feel like we’re somewhere or doing something that we’re actually not — whether it’s texting or a video conference or playing a videogame.  Temple professor Matthew Lombard described it to us this way:

“Presence,” he writes, “happens when people use technology and overlook at least part of its role in the experience, as when a telepresence conferencing system makes us feel as if we´re face-to-face; an online virtual world seems real; we get`lost´ in the worlds of novels, TV shows, movies, videogames and theme park rides; we think of and interact with computers, agents, avatars, robots and androids as if they were living social entities even though we know they´re not.”

Lombard, a telepresence expert who helped organize Presence Live 2012, has been to 14 telepresence conferences. Below, he recaps the event’s winning panel on social presence, in which one speaker suggests that humans have a need for presence.

Spatial presence — the illusion that you’re in a virtual environment created or transmitted by technology instead of your actual physical location — has gotten a ton of attention from researchers. But the panelists made the point that much less work has been done on social presence, the illusion that the people and avatars and characters you see, hear and interact with via technology are real and really there with you. And that’s arguably the more important kind of presence for us to understand as SMS, social media, Skype, tablets and high-end telepresence products like Cisco’s increasingly offer people almost any way of interacting with people that they want. We need to understand what characteristics of these technologies and their users and uses, drive those choices. One author even described a “need for presence” and suggested we study what creates and especially what satisfies that need.