Abstract
Recent advancement of information and communication technologies has evoked expectations for more natural and realistic communications. In studies on multimedia/multimodal communications, the enhancement of a sense of presence has been the most important issue. Although sense of presence have been intensively investigated over twenty years, it is little known yet. In this article, we first discuss the essence of sense of presence based on our recent survey of more than 200 non-researchers. Next, we show spatio-temporal characteristics for verisimilitude (vraisemblance), which is the reality or virtuality assumed to link essentially to foreground components in a scene, while contrasting it with the sense of presence, which, theoretically and empirically, has been found to relate dominantly to background components contained in a scene. Lastly we discuss future directions of measurements for higher order states of sensation such as sense of presence and verisimilitude, and its possible contributions to human-machine interfaces, communications, and entertainment technologies.
