Title:
EVALUATING PRESENCE BASED ON BALANCE

Speaker:
Tsutomu Fujinami (Research Centre for Life Style Design / JAIST)

Background:
Actors and dancers need to make his or her presence felt to others. Good actors leave us an impression that he is real just by standing. It is however difficult to explain such an effect of presence found among good actors.

Aims:
What makes an actor real? How can we feel his presence? We approach to actors' skill by collecting and analyzing data to establish a measure of presence.

Method:
A pair of persons was invited to take part in our experiment. We asked them to sit on a chair side-by-side, face-to-face, and back-to-back. Their data of centre of pressure (CoP) were measured using Wii-Fit Balance Board and were recorded onto PC using the program developed by one of the authors. The relevance of their CoPs is evaluated by calculating Hausdorff dimensions of the time series.

Results:
We found their time series of CoPs are related to each other for all cases. The analysis revealed that the pair is best connected when they sat face-to-face as we had expected. The second best connection is however found when they sat back-to-back against our expectation such that sitting side by side should result in better result than the case where they sat back-to-back.

Conclusions:
The result indicates that our feeling of presence is not solely determined by sight. Repeating the experiment under different conditions may identify other factors. There are limitations to the current study due to the small samples. Further study will inform us of felt presence.