Being and Time in XR: Other-Presentness Beyond Co-Presence

Abstract

Research in XR (Extended Reality) has conventionally centred upon concepts such as Presence, Embodiment, Social Presence, and Co-presence. Within these traditions, bodily action, sensory contingencies, synchronous interaction, and possibilities for action have generally been regarded as constitutive conditions for the experience of "being there" and of being with others. XR environments, however, permit the partial separation of conditions that ordinarily co-vary in everyday experience. Bodily co-presence, temporal simultaneity, spatial configuration, and social interaction need not remain inseparable. This paper approaches this possibility as a problem of other-presentness. Other-presentness refers to the conditions under which another individual is experienced as existing "here and now". The contribution of this paper does not lie in arguing that asynchronous others can evoke social responses; such observations have already been addressed within parasocial interaction and social presence research. Rather, the novelty lies in theorising XR as a technological condition capable of separating and operationalising the constitutive elements of other-presentness as design variables. Reconsidering Bodyless Presence as a methodological precedent and drawing upon experimental findings from Immersive Video research, this paper formulates Bodyless Presentness as a condition in which another individual continues to be experienced as presently existing despite attenuated bodily co-presence and weakened real-time simultaneity.