Cyberspace, Media and Interaction

Objectives

Telepresence, often shortened to presence, is a state or perception in which we overlook or misconstrue the role of technology and feel present in environments and/or connected to people or things we experience via technology or only exist via technology. For example, we get “lost” in the world of a videogame or virtual museum; we are "convinced" by the realism of paintings or graphic designs; we treat "intelligent" machines as if they have personalities of their own, and we feel like we are “with” a person we talk to via videoconference or through our avatars. It's increasingly relevant to a wide range of media experiences and application areas. The students, should: 1) aquire skills for a rigorous inspection and research about telepresence and its relation with other linked concepts namely interaction, interactivity, engagement, immersion, flow, and 2) understand human digital experience and communicational behaviors, namely on cyberspace.

General characterization

Code

02110258

Credits

10.0

Responsible teacher

Ana Araújo Barros Viseu

Hours

Weekly - 3

Total - 280

Teaching language

English

Prerequisites

Available soon

Bibliography

Idhe, Don (1990). Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth. Bloomington and Indianopolis: Indiana University Press. Kiousis, S. (2002). Interactivity: A Concept Explication. New Media & Society, Vol. 4, September, pp. 355-383. Kiran, A. (2012). Technological Presence: Actuality and Potentiality in Subject Constitution. A Journal for Philosophy and the Social Sciences. McMillan, Sally (2002). Exploring Models of Interactivity from Multiple Research Traditions: Users, Documents, and Systems. In Leah Lievrouw and Sonia Livingstone (eds.). Nilsson et al. (2016), Immersion revisited: A review of existing definitions of immersion and their relation to different theories of presence. Human Technology.Volume 12(2), November 2016, 108. Vu et al. (2012). Towards Evaluating Social Telepresence in Mobile Context. VRCAI 2012, Singapore, December 2-4, 2012. Zhao, S. (2004). Toward a Taxonomy of Copresence. Department of Sociology, Temple University, Philadelphia.

Teaching method

In class teaching. The teaching method includes theoretical exposition of contents supported by the active and critical participation of students.

Evaluation method

Método de avaliação - 1) Active individual participation and contribution on class, which includes two individual assignments with oral presentation in class (40%), the second one using interactivity in context as focus (2000 words);(40%), 2) A final individual paper (3000-4000 words), with oral presentation and discussion in class(60%)

Subject matter

1. Technological mediation, human-technology relations, human-technology interaction: theoretical framework. 2. What is Cyberspace? Still a useful concept? 3. About interaction design and experience design. 4. Interaction and interactivity. Active and passive interaction. The "place" of interfaces. 5. Tele(presence). From presence in tele-operations/tele-robotics and Virtual Reality to other digital mediated contexts. Social presence and co-presence. Artificial agents: bots, robots (and others). 6. Dimensions of telepresence: interactivity, vividness, engagement, immersion, flow.