Lighting a path while immersed in presence: A wayward introduction

The sense of presence in simulated environments, be it fragile and fleeting or sometimes deep and traumatizing, is the construct used to describe, measure, and sometimes evaluate and design and optimize systems that provide that ability. We spend more and more time in simulated realities provided by the systems that occupy our walls as screens or projections, fill our hands with messages from other places, or increasingly attach to our bodies and senses augmenting our physical reality with virtual objects, places, and beings. Within the work on presence there is an interdisciplinary community of researchers, who bring different theore tical and methodological approaches to the study of presence. The community of presence researchers include: psychology, philosophy, medicine, engineering, communication, and various other areas. This book represents some of the work from experienced researchers on presence with a weight on definitional and psychological issues and less on the engineering and technical aspects of specific interfaces.