Multiple Presence through Auditory Bots in Virtual Environments

This paper proposes that virtual environments that aim to support mutual presence for distributed work groups should allow for multiple partial presence. The introduction of teleworking, and the massive uptake of mobile phones have addressed a need for people to be virtually present (if not physically present) from many spatial locations. Conventional virtual environment systems, however, seem fixed to a notion of presence as being tied to being in a specific place. It is this view of VR that we have modified with collaborative working in mind. Specifically, we have extended a graphical Internet-based 3D world to allow for users to have multiple, proxy, avatars which provides a sense of partial presence in many locations in the virtual world, and/or in many different virtual worlds. Presence is now not tied to place, but to awareness of events. Users are connected to their proxies by audio cues, allowing for multiple locations to be attended to at once, creating a form of presence appropriate to the workplace.