solely for your information: two extracts from old FARAWAY texts: 1

Presence and tele-presence: the potential of sensorial information.

If the research dealing with presence and tele-presence is still on working practices and game playing, focusing on the activity to being performed, in the recent years there has been a growing interest in the emotional and affective dimension of remote interaction.

This new line of research centralizes on non-verbal languages and the use of sensorial modalities both for sending or receiving messages over distance. Blowing, touching, squeezing, smelling, lighting, vibration, are all increasingly used in experimental works to explore new ways of communicating presence. Projects like ‘LumiTouch’ (Chang et al. 2001), ‘The Bed’ (Dodge 1997), ‘Kiss communicator’ (Buchenau & Fulton 2000) and ‘Feather, Scent and Shaker’ (Strong & Gaver 1996) are some of the examples of this approach. Different from many existing means of communication, the concepts or prototypes proposed by these pieces incorporate sensorial information as elements of private language within the couple. The interesting aspect of this emerging trend is the underlying idea that alternative and less defined ways of expression might evoke another person’s presence in a more suggestive and poetic way than the exchange of verbal content.

Besides the common approach, these projects utilize specific and diverse mechanisms for the couple to interact remotely. Both ‘LumiTouch’ and ‘The Bed’ invest everyday objects with behaviors mimicking or recalling metaphorically the actions of a person that is far away; a couple of connected pictures frames that light up in response to touch in the first case, typical elements of a bedroom (pillows, bed, curtains) reacting to the actions of a remote person through aural, visual, and tactile messages in the latter. Conversely, the ‘Kiss Communicator’ and ‘Feather, Scent and Shaker’ propose pairs of artifacts specifically designed to allow couples to create and share a new sensorial language.

A sensorial channel that is commonly explored and seems particularly promising in distance communication is the tactile one. As several projects demonstrate, haptic communication offers great opportunities not only to convey presence (Brave & Dahely 1997), but also to develop complex languages over distance (Fogg et al. 1998; Chang et al. 2002). Even if they are not specifically focused on intimate relationships, projects like ‘inTouch’, ‘HandJive’ and ‘ComTouch’ shed light on the expressiveness of this kind of information and its possible role in augmenting existing channels.