Presence

Abstract

If one wants to turn virtual reality (VR) technology into an effective tool, it is vital to obtain a basic understanding of the key elements for success. A concept that has received a lot of attention from VR researchers is presence. Presence may be loosely described as the feeling of being there in the virtual world instead of just experiencing stimuli from displays (for a clear description of the difference between presence and immersion, refer to Slater immersion is defined as the extent to which the actual system delivers a surrounding environment, one which shuts out sensations from the "real world", which accommodates many sensory modalities, has rich representational capability, and so on; the term system immersion may be used for this, as opposed to an immersive response such as presence). Letting a user feel presence in a virtual world might be a goal in itself, but it has often been suggested that presence is a necessary element to reach higher goals. For instance, some researchers claimed that by developing an understanding of the factors that drive presence, their interrelationships, and how they relate to human performance and after-effects, a set of design principles could be specified that should lead to enhanced human performance in VR systems [15]. This chapter presents an overview of research on presence, i.e., theories, definitions, and multi-dimensionality (Section 2), effects (Section 3), measurement (Section 4), and determinants (Section 5). Section 6 contains some concluding remarks.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jul 01, 2007
Accession Number
ADA474136

Entities

People

  • Erik Den Dekker
  • Nico Delleman

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Biomedical

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Commerce
  • Computers
  • Consistency
  • Environment
  • Haptics
  • Identification
  • Images
  • Materials
  • Measurement
  • Personality
  • Psychology
  • Questionnaires
  • Reliability
  • Simulations
  • Simulators
  • Task Performance And Analysis
  • Virtual Reality

Readers

  • East Asian Political and Security Studies within the Soviet Union
  • Educational Psychology
  • Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).