Following tradition, ISPR Presence News posts will take a break while many of us gather this week for the ISPR 2011 conference in Edinburgh, Scotland (details on the web site). If you can’t join us this year, please consider attending ISPR 2012 at this time next fall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. Details and the call for papers will be coming soon! –Matthew Lombard (President, ISPR)…

  ISPR 2012 Conference Announcement The board of directors of the International Society for Presence Research  is pleased to announce that ISPR 2012, the 14th international conference on all things presence and telepresence, will take place on Wednesday-Friday October 24-26, 2012 in the City of Brotherly Love, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (USA). Full details and the Call for Papers will be posted in ISPR Presence News and on the ISPR web site in the weeks ahead. In the meantime, we hope to see you this October in Edinburgh, Scotland for ISPR 2011 – all the details including the provisional programme are available…

The provisional programme for the upcoming ISPR 2011 conference in Edinburgh, Scotland has been announced and can be found below and on the conference web site here). Full details about the conference are here. Please join us!   – Wednesday October 26 – 0830   Registration 0945   Welcome 1000   Keynote I: Professor Steve Benford, Nottingham University, England 1130   coffee SESSION I: That’s Entertainment 1200-1230 The Influence of 3D Screenings on Presence and Perceived Entertainment S. Sobieraj and Nicole C. Krämer 1230-1300 The Pleasure of Being (There?). An Explorative Study into the Effects of Presence and Identification on the Enjoyment of an…

The ISPR Presence bibliography now contains nearly 3,000 academic journal articles, book chapters, books, theses and dissertations related to telepresence and presence. The free bibliography is available on the ISPR web site (under “About Presence”). The site now includes a web form for the submission of additional references as well as a series of visualizations of the current (tele)presence literature. Because the scholarship related to (tele)presence is so interdisciplinary, standard indices and bibliographic databases include only pieces of the relevant literature; the use of the term “presence” as a shortened version of “telepresence” makes searching for relevant literature even more difficult.…

Word cloud visualization of ISPR Presence News and Presence-L post titles To provide a visual summary of what readers can find in ISPR Presence News items, we’ve used IBM’s Many Eyes software to create a word cloud based on the titles of the nearly 3,500 announcement posts on the Presence-L listserv from July 1999 to January 2010 and ISPR Presence News from January 2010 to July 1, 2011. The full-sized version of the word cloud can be found here; the list of titles used to generate the visualization are here (note that “Presence-related,” “News,” and “Call” were removed for the cloud).…

Your reactions to Presence News items ISPR Presence News has been limited to one-way communication about telepresence, but we want to know what you think about the diverse topics and ideas presented in our posts. So we’ve expanded the ISPR web site to  to include your comments on Presence News posts. You can add your reactions – ideas for studying phenomena, suggestions for expanding theories, predictions about future developments, references to relevant publications and other resources, reports about conference experiences, and anything else that could be of interest to the presence community –  at the bottom of any post on the site…

The International Society for Presence Research has conducted its first election and the individuals below have been elected to 2 year terms on the organization’s Board of Directors. If you have questions or suggestions regarding ISPR, or would like to help serve the organization and the telepresence community, please contact one of the Board members or send a message to ispr@ispr.info. Matthew Lombard (President) Media Interface and Network Design Lab (M.I.N.D. Lab) Department of Broadcasting, Telecommunications and Mass Media Mass Media & Communication Doctoral Program Temple University USA Phil Turner (Vice-President of Administration) School of Computing Edinburgh Napier University Scotland Robby Ratan (Vice-President of Development)…

Following a call for nominations, the members of the International Society for Presence Research (ISPR) are currently voting in the organization’s first election for positions on the Board of Directors (President; Vice-Presidentsof Administration, Development, and Membership; Secretary; Treasurer; Student Officer; and Open seats). The anonymous online election is being administered via ballotbin.com. If you are an ISPR member you should have received an email notice containing instructions and a password. Voting ends July 15, 2010. The election ballot also includes a short survey to assess ISPR members’ preferences regarding the timing, format and other aspects of future ISPR Presence conferences.…