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This volume arose from a longstanding conviction that our subjective experience of information technology is profoundly affected by the extent to which we feel ourselves to be really present in the mediated worlds that the technology makes available to us.‘Presence’is just this “feeling of being inside the mediated world”. It is a crucial and increasingly necessary element in both design and usage of many recent and developing interactive technologies. In the same way that ‘feeling present’, or consciously ‘being there’, in the physical world around us is based upon perception, physical action and activity in that world, so the feeling of presence in a technologically-mediated environment is a function of the possibilities for interaction.

A more advanced human-centred interaction with systems would provide users with a sense of being there, close to if not equivalent to the experience of actual presence. Creating this …