Recollections on Presence Beginnings, and Some Challenges for Augmented and Virtual Reality

Abstract

The idea for Presence began on the beach in Santa Barbara. Nat Durlach and I thought it would be fun to get some of the key programmers and engineers already doing VR and graphics software for computer gaming, film, and TV together with engineers from NASA, the military, and the aviation industry who had long been developing flight simulators and now were concerned about remote control and telepresence. We saw a close relation between VR and teleoperation, as depicted by Figure 1. To the extent that the computer-generated reality and the telepresence feedback from an actual tele- operator are both of sufficiently high quality, from the human operator’s viewpoint the mental model of the task and the interactions at the computer interface should be the same. In 1991 this sameness was clearly a stretch for many reasons, but it was clear that there was much we could gain from sharing ideas, and to the best of our knowledge there had been minimal interaction to date between those two communities.