Application scenarios
IPCity focuses on novel application areas around urban life and social gathering: environmental awareness, urban renewal, urban exploration (time warp, city tales).
The scenarios developed for these showcases address in distinctive ways the various dimensions of presence indicating novel aspects to be considered:
- the role of participation in a mediating system to achieve presence
- the multiplicity and dynamics of social networks
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augmenting presence by giving access and perception of hidden or invisible aspects of a place
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supporting the perception of an event that is distributed in an area and that is partly (at times) collocated and partly (at times) moderately remote
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the temporal fluctuations of presence including considering presence in its episodic
character
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the construction and maintenance of presence closely related to avoiding or managing interruptions, and re-orienting attention after interruptions
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the role of memory in constructing and maintaining presence informing the design of mixed media interfaces (multi-sensorial content delivery)
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providing mechanisms for a “shared memory” in support of accountability between participants and mutual understanding.
Mixed reality allows participants to change and actively shape the configurations of real and virtual layers into an experience – mixing places, (historical) times, staging events, changing social formations and identities.
IPCity moves beyond the state of the art of Presence Research also in respect to methodology. Most of the research in Presence has been carried out in laboratory settings. Field trials in real setting are new to presence research as also mobile and public applications. This requires devising a new triangulation of research methods combining common methods like presence questionnaires with methods for the field (relatively unexplored for presence research) ethnography, quasi experiments, and interaction analysis. Qualitative and quantitative methods will be integrated to account for cognitive and socio-cultural aspects.
