I. THE PRESENCE OF THE FUTURE

We view the sense of presence as being the result of an evolved neuropsychological process, created through the evolution of the central nervous system, and which solves a key problem for an organism’s survival: how to differentiate between the internal (the self) and the external (the other). When we experience strong mediated presence, our experience is that the technology has become part of the self, and the mediated reality part of the other. There is no attentional effort of access to information. We can perceive and often act directly, as if unmediated. The rapidly developing phenomena of mediated presence point beyond the replacement of the world with virtual other worlds, and towards dynamically changing relationships between self (and selves) and others. We discuss the implications these developments for the future of the sense of presence and of presence research. 1. The past and future evolution of presence

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