Interesting characteristics of large-scale events are their spatial distribution, their extended duration over days, and the fact that they are set apart from daily life. The increasing pervasiveness of computational media encourages us to investigate such unexplored domains, especially when thinking of applications for spectator groups. Here we report of a field study on two groups of rally spectators who were equipped with multimedia phones, and we present a novel mobile group media application called mGroup that supports groups in creating and sharing experiences. Particularly, we look at the possibilities of and boundary conditions for computer applications posed by our findings on group identity and formation, group awareness and coordination, the meaningful construction of an event experience and its grounding in the event context, the shared context and discourses, protagonism and active spectatorship. Moreover, we aim at providing a new perspective on spectatorship at large scale events, which can make research and development more aware of the socio-cultural dimension.

This paper discusses the value of identifying the expanding interdisciplinary scholarly literature on the topic of (tele)presence, proposes a detailed procedure for doing so, and presents a list of 1,831 journal articles, books and other publications that constitute the (tele)presence literature as of May 2007.

Research on virtual environments has provided insights into the experience of presence (or being there) and copresence (being there together). Several dimensions of this experience, including the realism of the environment and of the avatar embodiment, have been investigated. At the same time, research on a number of new media has begun to use concepts that are similar to copresence, such as mutual awareness, connected presence, and engagement. Since digital environments can be reconfigured and combined easily, and since an increasing number of such environments are used to connect people in their everyday lives, it is useful to think about the various modalities of connected presence as a continuum – with shared virtual environments in which people are fully immersed as an end-state. This paper proposes a model for the different modalities of connected presence whereby research on shared virtual environments can be integrated with research on other new media- and vice versa. It is argued that this model can improve our understanding both of the uses of shared virtual environments and of their future development among a variety of media for ‘being there together’.

Presence is widely accepted as the key concept to be considered in any research involving human interaction with Virtual Reality (VR). Since its original description, the concept of presence has developed over the past decade to be considered by many researchers as the essence of any experience in a virtual environment. The VR generating systems comprise two main parts: a technological component and a psychological experience. The different relevance given to them produced two different but coexisting visions of presence: the rationalist and the psychological/ecological points of view. The rationalist point of view considers a VR system as a collection of specific machines with the necessity of the inclusion of the concept of presence. The researchers agreeing with this approach describe the sense of presence as a function of the experience of a given medium (Media Presence). The main result of this approach is the definition of presence as the perceptual illusion of non-mediation produced by means of the disappearance of the medium from the conscious attention of the subject. At the other extreme, there

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Abstract. The modelling of affective behaviour and appropriate bodily expression to make synthetic characters more believable becomes important in many types of applications such as games, story telling, training environment, virtual therapy and interactive conversational agents. This paper describes report on the results of an experiment designed to study the empathy inspired to users when looking at static human images. An experiment was carried out with 36 participants who were asked to categorized 30 cards of static human images into six basic categories of emotions and using the rating scale, subjects judge the compatible of each posture into each emotional category. Emotional categories are differed in term of groups and level of emotional for every posture. The approach of the study is to find out which human posture of body movement represent specific emotion and the state of emotional level represent by each posture.

To support social interactions characterizing most activities in virtual communities, system design needs to go beyond functional and user-friendliness requirements to incorporate the demands for supporting social environments and activities. Social presence, as a subjective nature of communication media, reflects the perception of social actors as well as social settings and has been regarded as one of the major design principles for virtual communities. Our study explores its potential in facilitating the social identification process and promoting community participation. Drawing upon the social identity theory, we develop a model explaining the effects of social presence on social identification and community participation. An empirical study involving 430 members from four different virtual communities of interest provide strong support for our model. The theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed.

Virtual communities provide an important venue for knowledge sharing. Prior research has demonstrated that both system design factors, e.g., social presence, and social aspects of VC, e.g., social identity, are critical for encouraging knowledge contribution. However, we still lack a good understanding of how the system design and the social aspects of VC jointly influence members ’ knowledge contribution. Also the uni-dimensional conceptualization of social presence in most prior research may not be sufficient to capture the complexity in VC interaction. To address these theoretical voids, a research model is developed to explain the effect of social presence on knowledge contribution as mediated through social identity. More particularly, drawing upon environmental psychology literature and prior research on social presence, we propose a three-dimensional conceptualization, consisting of sensory, affective, and cognitive components, and discuss their distinct roles in developing social identification and promoting knowledge contribution. The research model was empirically tested with a survey involving 430 registered members. The results provided a strong support for the validity and usability of the multi-dimensional conceptualization of social presence.

Synthetically generated 3D humans often fail to express a full range of emotions or present different levels of the same type of emotion. Transcending the facial expression, what should a happy synthetically generated human look like? What about a slightly happy or ecstatically happy? This paper reports a study aimed at identifying the appropriate bodily expressions for various emotions in 3D human-like figures at varying emotional strength. Thirty-six volunteers were asked to discriminate and categorize thirty cards with static poses of 3D human-like characters into the Ekman’s six basic categories of emotions. This is to judge the compatibility of each posture in relation to each category and to rate their level of emotion within the group. Categories and Subject Descriptors