Highlights key research currently being undertaken within the field of telepresence, providing the most detailed account of the field to date, advancing our understanding of a fundamental property of all media - the illusion of presence; the sense of “being there” inside a virtual environment, with actual or virtual others. This collection has been put together by leading international scholars from America, Europe, and Asia. Together, they describe the state-of-the-art in presence theory, research and technology design for an advanced academic audience.

Immersed in Media provides research that can help designers optimize presence for users of advanced media technologies such as virtual and augmented reality, collaborative social media, robotics, and artificial intelligence and lead us to better understand human cognition, emotion and behaviour.

Lighting a Path While Immersed in Presence: A Wayward Introduction.- Defining Presence.- Presence: Form, Content and Consciousness.- Affect, Availability and Presence.- Intention, Action, Self and Other: An Evolutionary Model of Presence.- An Action Based Approach to Presence.- Spatial Presence Theory: State of the Art and Challenges Ahead.- Ways to Measure Presence: Review and Future Directions.- An Integrative Approach to Presence and Self-Motion Perception Research.- Patterns of Place: An Integrated Approach for the Design and Evaluation of Real and Virtual Environments.- Collaboration in Immersive and Non-Immersive Virtual Environments.- Presence-Inducing Media for Mental Health Applications.