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This study explored how telepresence could be affected by stimuli from reality that distracts people while they are watching television. The sample comprised of 36 undergraduate and graduate students from a university in South Korea (age range: 18–38 years, M = 22.61, and SD = 4.12). A between-subjects experimental design was employed with two types of viewing equipment (a television screen vs. a television screen with side screens that act as stimuli from reality) and two bezel widths (2 cm vs. 10 cm) to examine how each condition influenced the viewers' perceived telepresence. The results revealed that participants' perception of telepresence was not affected by the type of viewing equipment. However, the level of telepresence was affected by the bezel width: the thinner the bezel, the more telepresence felt by the viewers. These findings provide important insights that can guide the future designs of screen bezels for televisions and other devices in order to more effectively create immersive virtual worlds. Future studies are needed to examine the relationship between central vision and telepresence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technical mediations are commonly used by remote persons to exercise legal rights in distant places, but the legal ability of remote persons to substitute their physical presence using technical mediations is broadly shaped by whether the public accepts that a specific form of technical mediation of a remote person is tantamount to their physical presence. In telepresence robot markets, local users already accept that remote robot operators can exercise serious professional rights via telepresence robots. It is likely that the public acceptance of local rights of remote operators via telepresence robots in workplaces may at some point be expanded to include more fundamental human rights in social life. To verify the superior potential of remote operators mediated via telepresence robots to be socially accepted as bearers of fundamental rights, which theoretically qualify the juridical concept of “person” as bearers of rights and following duties, this study compared public acceptance of remote operators to exercise fundamental rights via a telepresence robot with physical control and a stationary video call stand without physical control. In experiments with 210 Korean participants, responses to whether a remote operator mediated via a telepresence robot should be granted fundamental rights were close to neutral, which was generally higher than the responses received for a remote person mediated by a stationary video call stand. The result shows that a remote operator with physical control on a technical mediation has more potentials to evolve into legal persons with greater fundamental rights in a local environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated how presence affected consumer intention to participate in a social commerce site (i.e., the consumer participation intention of social commerce through the presence role), based on the stimulus-organism-response framework. An organism's internal states in the social commerce context were composed of two tiered states: presence and affect/cognition. For the benefit of parsimony, social presence and telepresence were chosen as dimensions of presence, and usefulness and enjoyment were chosen as affect and cognition variables. The analysis results showed that social presence and telepresence played mediating roles between stimuli (interactivity and vividness) and the sequent internal states (usefulness and enjoyment). Both usefulness and enjoyment significantly influenced the response of the organism (i.e., the consumer participation intention of social commerce). Therefore, it was demonstrated that the mediating role of presence was of great significance in the social commerce context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]