The ethical and societal implications of presence from a distance

2014

In discussions about teleoperation systems and virtual reality environments, the notion of distance, i.e. in physical space, is often considered as a problem, causing many technological bottlenecks, such as time delay, communication breakdowns, lack of communication services quality, etc. In this paper, however, we propose to shift the engineering viewpoint, and to consider distance from an anthropological standpoint, that is, not as a source of “technological problems ” but as the source of moral implications. In other words, we will review some of the sociological and psychological effects that the abnegation of distance, which is currently brought about by telepresence technologies, plays and has played on the moral dimension of human beings. 1.

2008

1.1 Shifting from Physicality to Virtuality No prior generation has witnessed such an extraordinary acceleration of technological power over reality. Corresponding social changes and ethical responsibilities accompany this acceleration (Floridi, 2002). To be sure, computing and new telecommunication technologies are well along in creating a global network of social communications with near instantaneous transmission of information, ideas, and value judgments in science, commerce, education, politics, religion, entertainment, and every other facet of human activity. Indeed the very fabric of human understanding shifts as physical reality gives way to virtual reality, or more appropriately, to virtuality, concurrently transforming of the way philosophers understand foundational concepts like mind, consciousness, experience, knowledge, truth, ethics, and creativity. While the Internet has been considered the latest and in many respects the most powerful in the continuum of evolving media from the telegraph to telephone, radio, and television, virtual reality communication media emerge as the forward edge of a general evolution towards the emergence of a metamedium and explicitly embody “a destination for the evolution of this metamedium" (Biocca & Levy, 1995), p. 16). A metamedium transcends the ability to merely statistically represent. A metamedium can dynamically simulate (Kay, 1990). Virtuality communication media dynamically simulate experience perceived as telepresence.

Interactivity, the connection of a person or a group to another, remains at the heart of economic, social and political life. Education and learning also depend on interaction. Today the tools we use for interacting and as means for allocating our attention are changing. One such tool is telepresence. At its high-performance end telepresence is almost like "being there". High bandwidth, high definition video and audio, corrected for lighting and perspective, it allows people in different cities or different continents to engage in a conversation with fidelity that is tantamount to being in the same room. This paper offers an analytical framework and a few "what-if" examples that help to imagine how telepresence might change things in the future. The paper starts with a discussion of the relationship between technological and economic change, arguing that indirect effects are often the most important. We show that communication has many different dimensions -it is not just about information, but also about interpretation and relationships.

2019

Why examine the concept of telepresence? A number of emerging technologies, including virtual reality, simulation, home theater, state-of-the-art video conferencing and virtual three-dimensional (3-D) environment, are designed to give the user a type of mediated experience that has never been possible before. This new experience seems to be “real,” “direct” and “immediate.” The term telepresence has been used to describe this compelling sense of being present in these mediated virtual environments (Held & Durlach, 1992; Steuer, 1992). On the empirical side, the use of this new revolution in media technologies has expanded to telemedicine, telepsychiatry, distance learning, legal testimony from remote locations, arcade games and more (see Lombard & Ditton, 1997). An enhanced sense of telepresence is central to the usefulness and profitability of the new technologies mentioned above, and others such as the World Wide Web and highdefinition television. As underlined by Zhang, Benbasat,...

CyberPsychology & Behavior, 1999

Synthetic environments (SE) feature computer-mediated interaction with an environment physically separate from the user. An SE allows human perceptual, cognitive, and psychomotor capabilities to be projected into distant, dangerous, or simulated environments. This paper examines some aspects of application of immersive/telepresence interfaces and discusses how the new technology fits into a user-centered design approach to teleoperators and virtual environments. The central theme of an immersive/telepresence design approach is that the world may be displayed to a user as if that person was physically present in a computer-mediated world. However, the ability of SE's to re-create a computer-mediated world by using immersive displays does not annul the responsibility of designers to tailor interfaces to meet the task-dependant needs of users. Whether functioning in reality or a virtual reality, interfaces must satisfy user information requirements to optimize performance. It does not necessarily follow that the combination of immersive interfaces, strict reproduction of the remote world, and telepresence gives users the most efficient human-machine interface. Other aspects of human behavior, such as concentration and attentional resource allocation or situation awareness, which are not necessarily encompassed by the concept of telepresence, need to be considered in the interface design.

Philosophy of Education

familiar from analyses of epistolary fiction, 3 and from debates and theory about speech and writing, presence and absence, from Plato to Derrida. New televisual communication, on the other hand, brings with it a different set of issues, involving representations of embodiment, speech, hearing, and vision, and resulting in a rather different interplay between immediacy and mediation. Together with virtual reality, audio/visual communication has been characterized as bringing mediated experience into a "post-symbolic" era, 4 delimiting horizons that include the (relative) immediacy of reciprocity and disjuncture of embodied self and other, of voice, hearing, and gaze. Microsoft's Skype, 5 Apple's FaceTime and Google's Hangouts boast that their users can be "in two places at once," that "conversa-

Geographically distributed design and engineering teams face barriers to effective and intuitive collaboration that current communication technologies have difficulty mediating. Contextual clues, rapid iteration of ideas and ease of direct physical interaction are often lost. We believe that introducing expressive robotic avatars into designers' workflows can create more direct, engaging and productive exchanges for geographically distributed teams.

Tablets and smart phones, together with new communication services such as Skype and Facetime, have changed what it means to "keep in touch". In changing communicative practice, these media are delimiting new experiential horizons, providing phenomenological research with novel variations on the lived experience of space and embodiment, self and other. Online textual communications have been shown to bring with them a dynamic tension between sensed presence and factual absence, between the immediacy of reaction and mediation of response (e.g., Friesen 2011; Milne 2013). Such tensions are already long familiar from analyses of epistolary writing (e.g., Altman 1982), and from arguments about speech and writing, presence and absence, from Plato to Derrida. Videoconferencing, on the other hand, brings with it a different set of issues, reintroducing embodiment, speech, hearing and vision, and resulting in a rather different interplay between immediacy and mediation. Together with virtual reality, video communication has been characterized in this connection as "post-symbolic" (Lanier 1989, S.118), delimiting horizons that include the reciprocity and disjuncture of embodied self and other, of voice, hearing and gaze.

1990

The purpose here is to examine the concept of telepresence critically. To accomplish this goal, first, the assumptions that underlie telepresence and its applications are examined, and second, the issues raised by that examination are discussed. Also, these assumptions and issues are used as a means of shifting the focus in telepresence from development to user-based research.