PRESENCE

The concept of presence can be understood as a synthesis of interrelated psychophysical ingredients where multiple perceptual dimensions intervene. A better understanding of how specific aspects such as:

• plausibility, the illusion that virtual events are really happening,
• co-presence, the illusion of being with others, or
• place illusion, the feeling of being there,

impact the XR experience is key to improve their quality. The availability and performance of current technologies do not reach yet high levels of presence in XR, essential to get us closer than ever to the perennial VR dream: to be anywhere, doing anything, together with others from any place.

PRESENCE will impact multiple dimensions of presence in physical-digital worlds, addressing three main challenges:

1. how to create realistic visual interactions among remote humans, delivering high-end holoportation paradigms based on live volumetric capturing, compression and optimization techniques under heterogeneous computation and network conditions;
2. how to provide realistic touch among remote users and synthetic objects, developing novel haptic systems and enabling spatial multi device synchronisation in multi user scenarios;
3. how to produce realistic social interactions among avatars and agents, generating AI virtual humans, representing real users or AI agents.

PRESENCE will ensure the future uptake of research results following a threefold evaluation method: 1) each technology will be independently evaluated to understand its impact on the illusion of presence; 2) each component will be evaluated by the integration team, providing scientific and technical feedback in order to facilitate their use in each project iteration as well as beyond the project scope, towards technology transfer and exploitation; 3) all components will be integrated in two demonstrators (professional and social setups) evaluating the user experience following a human-centred design approach.