Being There & Being With: The Philosophical and Cognitive Notions of Presence and Embodiment in Virtual Instruments

In this paper, we will discuss two main concepts, associated with the development of Virtual Worlds, which are “Presence” and “Embodiment”. Presence is stamped as the sense of “Being there”, that has to be reconstructed in Local world to render Distant Worlds accessible by networked or mediated communications. “Embodiment” could be the property of a Virtual entity to be incorporated by human as a second nature. We will show then, how (1) the first situation can be seen as a definition of “immateriality” and its correlative concept of infinity, (2) the second situation can be seen as a definition of “tangibility” with its correlative concept of instrumental embodiment. After exploring the complementary properties of these situations in detail, we will focus on the second one, identified as “the instrumental situation”. We will propose some of its relevant properties, those that are able to trigger the sense of embodiment, as the main property supported in the real physical world by the feature of “tangibility”. Consequently, we estimate that “embodiment” is more important than the tangibility in itself and we examine some criteria able to help us to recreate them in digital representations.