This Integrated Project will undertake a Research Programme that has as its major goal the delivery of presence in wide area distributed mixed reality environments.

The environment will include a physical installation that people can visit both physically and virtually. The installation will be the embodiment of an artificial intelligent entity that understands and learns from its interaction with people. People who inhabit the installation will at any one time be physically there, virtually there but remote, or entirely virtual beings with their own goals and capabilities for interacting with one another and with embodiments of real people.

Specific subclasses of the installation will be used to construct a number of application scenarios, such as a persistent virtual community that embodies the project itself.

The core methodology will be to achieve this through the identification, understanding and exploitation of cerebral mechanisms for presence in conjunction with advances in the underlying technology for mixed reality display and interaction, with special attention to the interaction between people, and also between people and virtual people. Such cerebral mechanisms will be the basis for a core aspect of the IP which is the exploitation of brain-computer interfaces.

Processes within the environments adapt and correlate with the behaviour and state of people, and in addition, people can effect changes within the environment through thought as well as through motor actions.