Feeling Present in Mixed Reality 5 If only the physical/social world in which our bodies are located and the virtual world of digital information and communication could somehow be blended into one seamless reality. In this blend of the digital and the physical we would experienceanintegratedandunitarysenseofpresence.Wewouldbeabletofunction smoothly and effortlessly and enjoy the best of both worlds. But how can this be done?Thatisthemainquestionweaddressthroughoutthe book. In the remainder of this chapter we discuss the nature of the sense of presence in the physical and the digital world, and how they can interfere with each other, stressing the discontinuities in communicational context between the two. We provide examples of the problems of this discontinuity and its effects in different everydaysettings.Wethenintroducetheideaofblendedrealityspaces,asananswer to problems of functioning in our current unevenly mixed realities. Feeling Present in Mixed Reality Presence and Mediated Presence Wedefinepresence as the feeling of being located in a perceptible external world around the self (Waterworth et al. 2015). We see this as a universal animal faculty that allows an organism to distinguish the self from the non-self – what is part of the organism and what is not. This is a fundamental neurological ability supporting, amongst other activities, feeding, locomotion, sexual reproduction, and homeostasis. Its roots lie in proprioception and adaptive movement relative to the worldaroundtheorganism. Through evolution, animals gradually acquired the capacity to form internal representations of situations and things that are not physically present in their surroundings. This ability supports a range of intelligent behaviours, not least forming and mentally running future plans of possible actions, often based on remembered and selected aspects of earlier behaviour. In humans, a calibrated sense of presence has evolved to allow us to identify when and to what extent we are dealing with internal representations of past or possible future events as compared to when we are dealing with current events actually happening in our present environment(see Waterworth et al. 2010, 2015, for more details). Asthinkingorganisms,people routinely deal with two kinds of information, the concreteandtheabstract.Bydefinition,concreteinformationisinaformthatcanbe dealt with directly via the perceptual-motorsystems; it includes informationcoming from the world around us, and it gives rise to the sense of presence. Concrete information is realized as the world or, through digital technology as a (virtual) world that we experience as existing outside our minds. As far as out sense of presence is concerned, there is no difference between a fully convincing immersive virtual reality (VR) and the physical world. Mediated presence, as it is often called, is no different from the point of view of the organism from physical presence (Waterworth et al. 2010).