Right off the bat - I have to add a disclaimer that I can't talk about everything I'm doing in this area due to it's proprietary nature. But what I can talk about is the concept of virtual presence itself.
When we talk about virtual presence, we are concerned with recreating or simulating physical presence online. Right? But is that truly the ultimate goal - or is it just an assumption based on bias towards what we already know? Physical presence is not perfect - do we really want to duplicate those imperfections, or do we want to improve upon them? Consider MMORPG games with their HUDs - is that not better than physical presence in some ways? More informative?
OK, let's back up a bit and layer on some context. I postulate that the goal of virtual presence is to enhance communication (i.e., understanding) and collaboration (i.e., joint productivity.) There may be other goals - such as pure entertainment or even voyeurism - but let's work from my presumption. What is it about physical presence that enhances the ability to meet those goals?
Well - for starters, you don't have to tweet your status. Your physically-present collaborators can often just look over your shoulder and see what you are doing. Another enhancement is the depth of communication based on non-verbal/textual queues. Yes, video chat does convey some of that - but there is the added complexity and time-delay of scheduling the chat with a meeting agenda, logging on, connecting, etc. This extra effort in online video chat (vs just walking in to my office) reduces the quality of communication to some degree, but it also significantly reduces it's frequency and timeliness.
Beyond that - are the 4 physical dimensions sufficient? Or maybe we should consider a different set of base dimensions? What if we were "present" online in semantic dimensions instead of physical ones? Instead of mapping perceptual coordinates to physical ones - what if we saw meaningful relationships instead? Semantic networks come to mind immediately - or even semantic clouds. Would it be useful to understanding and productivity if we interacted with online collaborators via semantic relationships? What would that even look like?
Ok, I can't go much further. But feedback or links to related research would be very welcome.
