“Do We Need to ‘Be There’ to Say Goodbye? Comparing Participatory Agency and Spatial Presence Across Digital Farewell Formats” was submitted to arXiv on 22 October 2026 (arXiv:2610.30734). Its Comments field reads: “10 pages, 4 figures. Accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (ISMAR 2026). Author accepted manuscript.”
So this is peer-reviewed and venue-confirmed — TVCG via ISMAR 2026 — which is worth stating up front because we published another ISMAR 2026 TVCG paper yesterday and the two are unrelated beyond the venue.
Why this is an XR question and not a sociology one
Funerals are a hard case for presence research, and that is exactly why they are useful.
Most presence studies measure whether a user feels located in a virtual place. The metric is usually some combination of self-report and behavioural proxy, and the task is usually arbitrary — navigate a room, find an object, complete a puzzle. The trouble with arbitrary tasks is that nothing is at stake, so “presence” collapses into “immersion,” and immersion is largely a function of pixel count and head-tracking latency.
A farewell ritual is not arbitrary. It has a function: it is supposed to let the participant perform an act of leave-taking, and either it worked or it did not. That makes it a rare case where you can ask whether a format delivered participatory agency — the sense of having done something rather than watched something — separately from whether it delivered spatial presence.
Those two can come apart, and the paper’s framing suggests that is the point. A high-fidelity 360° video of a graveside puts you convincingly in the place while giving you nothing to do. A low-fidelity shared virtual space with poor visuals might let you place an object, speak, or move toward the coffin. If agency and presence dissociate, then “be there” is at least two different requirements and XR designers have been treating them as one.
What it compares
The study compares multiple digital farewell formats on participatory agency and spatial presence. The abstract positions it as a comparison across formats rather than an evaluation of a single system — which, in this literature, usually means some arrangement of video attendance, a shared virtual environment, and a non-immersive baseline.
We are being deliberately careful here. We have the title, the venue, the length and the two constructs being measured. We have not read the full author manuscript, and the specific format conditions, sample size, and effect directions are not things we are going to assert from an abstract. When the TVCG version is accessible we will say what it found.
What we can say is why the measurement design is the interesting contribution, and that part is legible from the framing alone.
The practical stake
This is not a niche application. Remote attendance at funerals became normal out of necessity and then persisted out of convenience and cost — families are distributed, travel is expensive, and the people most likely to be unable to travel are the elderly and the ill, who are also the most likely to be bereaved.
The design question is live right now and being answered badly by default. Most remote funeral provision is a webcam pointed at a chapel and a one-way stream. If the research shows that participatory agency is what produces a sense of adequate farewell, then a one-way stream is close to the worst available option regardless of its image quality, and the fix is cheap: give the remote mourner something to do — a gesture that registers in the room, an object they place, a point at which they are addressed.
For readers building social and spatial experiences, the transferable finding is likely to be the dissociation itself. If you are optimising fidelity to produce presence, and your users need agency, more pixels will not help.
Where it sits
ISMAR has run a steady line of work on presence in consequential settings — medical, industrial, and increasingly social and affective. A TVCG paper on grief rituals is a sign of the field taking seriously that the hard problems in mixed reality are not rendering problems.
It also sits alongside the other thing we noticed this round: a “being there” question is a question about what the format permits you to do, which is the same shape as a question about what a licence permits you to do. Both are cases where the surface claim — you are present; this is open — needs checking against the actual affordance.
Sources
- Do We Need to “Be There” to Say Goodbye? Comparing Participatory Agency and Spatial Presence Across Digital Farewell Formats — arXiv:2610.30734
- IEEE ISMAR 2026
- IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics