Abstract Since the wider adoption of Virtual Reality (VR), scholars in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and User Experience (UX) have studied presence - when the users’ perceptual, vestibular, proprioceptive, and autonomic nervous systems are activated in a similar way as in real-life situations - as a measurable output of a technical system. This quantitative approach, however, often achieves clarity by stripping away the multifaceted nature of lived experiences and the social frictions that emerge when presence is shared rather than solitary. In response to this limitation, this paper proposes a relational framework that shifts the study of presence from a measurable variable to a shared, situated, ethical practice. Building upon Mol’s (2008) logic of care, we introduce presence-as-method, a toolkit designed to navigate the sensorial and ethical frictions of ethnographic observations in Social Virtual Reality (SVR). The toolkit is built upon an accumulative decade of experience in research on social virtual worlds and presence. It is operationalized through four tools: (1) iterative positionality and (2) ongoing consent, (3) affective journaling, and (4) embodied description. We demonstrate the toolkit's utility through an illustrative ethnographic encounter in VRChat, which highlights how actively and continuously reflecting upon one's presence in SVR enables a more nuanced understanding of power, vulnerability, and sociality in immersive digital environments.
Zheleva et al. (Thu,) studied this question.