On Ubiquitous Technology, a DigitalWorld and their Influence on People's Feeling and Control of Presence in Everyday Life

Abstract

Ubiquitous technology, e.g., smartphones or tablets, has created a continuously available digital world, drastically changing our feeling of being in the here and now - named presence. We thus increasingly shift between the real and the digital world, ranging from losing awareness of real surroundings to cutting out the digital world to truly be in the real one. In this work, we aim to explore the middle ground in between. We move beyond classic VR research on presence and look at everyday ubiquitous technology and its influence on presence in the real and digital world. By means of a focus group (N=6) and a subsequent online survey (N=36), we gathered individual notions of presence as well as experiences and situations in which people move between the worlds. We discuss the need to further explore presence and its dynamics across the real and digital worlds in everyday life.