Presence research studies the experience of being in a place or being with someone as it is mediated through technology. The experience of presence appears to be a complex perception, formed through an interplay of raw multisensory data, spatial perception, attention, cognition, and motor action, all coupled through a constant dynamic loop of sensorimotor correspondence. The fact that technology can start working as a transparent extension of our own bodies is critically dependent on (i) intuitive interaction devices which are 'invisible-in-use', seamlessly matched to our sensorimotor abilities, and (ii) the highly plastic nature of our brain, which is continuously able and prone to adapt to altered sensorimotor contingencies. The perception of ourselves as part of an environment, virtual or real, critically depends on the ability to actively explore the environment, allowing the perceptual systems to construct a spatial map based on sensorimotor dependencies. Provided the real-time, reliable correlations between motor actions and multisensory inputs remain intact, the integration of telepresence technologies into our ongoing perceptual-motor loop can be usefully understood as a change in body image perception -a phenomenal extension of the self.
IntroductionInteractive systems that allow users to control and manipulate real-world objects within a remote real environment are known as teleoperator systems. Remote-controlled manipulators (e.g., robot arms) and vehicles (e.g., NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers) are being employed to enable human work in hazardous or challenging environments such as space exploration, undersea operations, or hazardous waste clean-up. They also allow for transforming the temporal and spatial scale of operation, as is the case with for instance minimally invasive surgery. In teleoperation, the human operator directly and continuously guides and causes each change in the remote manipulator. Sensors at the remote site (e.g., a stereoscopic camera, force sensors) provide continuous feedback about the slave's position in relation to the remote object, thereby closing the continuous perception-action loop that involves the operator, the master system with which she interacts locally, and the remote slave system. In the context of telerobotics, telepresence is closely associated to the sense of distal attribution (Loomis, 1992), the externalisation of the self to include remote tools that phenomenologically become extensions of one's own body, even if they are not physically part of it.
