Virtual Reality (VR) Presence And Plausibility

Research on VR Presence & Plausibility with VR Technical Achievement Award Winner Anthony Steed (+Podcast, +Video)

Voices of VR Podcast - Episode #416

Kent Bye | August 10, 2016

One of the gold standards of a VR experience is being able to achieve Presence, but Presence is an elusive concept to precisely define. Mel Slater is one of the leading researchers into Presence and says that it’s a combination of the ‘Place Illusion’ and ‘Presence Illusion’, which Richard Skarbez elaborates by saying that the Place Illusion represents the degree of immersion that you feel by being transported to another place, and the Plausibility Illusion is the degree to which you feel that that the overall scene matches your expectations for coherence.

"At some point, virtual reality is so accurate, so compelling that it accomplishes what Oculus Rift CEO Brendan Iribe described to an audience of several hundred as “Presence.” Presence within virtual reality is when, on a basic subconscious level, your brain reacts to the stimuli you see and hear as if it is real. Presence is when the subconscious has accepted the new reality, and the subconscious reactions of excitement, fear, joy, curiosity, etc. spill out of your body instinctively." Source: http://www.opposingviews.com/i/technology/gadgets/virtual-reality-here-now-and-it-will-change-life-we-know-it

'Perceptive Presence. All of these experiences lack perceptive presence, which is in fact fooling your senses in a realistic way. Vision, but also sound, touch, smell, proprioception… Keep in mind that humans are not able to perceive the world perfectly: the human brain makes all sorts of simplifications. Knowing the limits of human perception, which is a fundamental part of understanding VR, allows you to create perceptive illusions, such as redirected walking or impossible spaces. So how do you achieve that? The most basic way of creating perceptive presence is by using head tracking. Moving your head and, as a result of this movement, seeing the world from a different viewpoint, is the basis for the action/perception loop. So you need to be able to move, and those moves must have an effect on the virtual world. Your body is engaged: as Antonio Damasio says, “the mind is embodied, not just embrained.”' Source: http://www.middlevr.com/resources/what-is-vr/

<more at http://www.roadtovr.com/research-vr-presence-plausibility-anthony-steed/; related articles and links; http://vr.cs.ucl.ac.uk/vrjam/ (A Large Scale Pub­lic Exper­i­ment on Presence. May 2015) and http://s3.amazonaws.com/publicationslist.org/data/melslater/ref-24/depth%20of%20presence.pdf (Depth of Presence in Virtual Environments. Mel Slater, Martin Usoh, Anthony Steed. [Abstract: This paper describes a study to assess the influence of a variety of factors on reported level of presence in immersive virtual environments. It introduces the idea of "stacking depth", that is, where a participant can simulate the process of entering the virtual environment while already in such an environment, which can be repeated to several levels of depth. An experimental study including 24 subjects was carried out. Half of the subjects were transported between environments by using virtual Head-mounted displays, and the other half by going through doors. Three other binary factors were: whether or not gravity operated, whether or not the subject experienced a virtual precipice, and whether or not the subject was followed around by a virtual actor. Visual, auditory and kinesthetic representation systems, and egocentric/exocentric perceptual positions were assessed by a pre-experiment questionnaire. Presence was assessed by the subjects as their sense of "being there", the extent to which they experienced the virtual environments as more the presenting reality than the real world in which the experiment was taking place, and the extent to which the subject experienced the virtual environments as places visited rather than images seen. A logistic regression analysis revealed that subjective reporting of presence was significantly positively associated with visual and kinesthetic representation systems, and negatively with the auditory system. This was not surprising since the virtual reality system used was primarily visual. The analysis also showed a significant and positive association with stacking level depth for those who were transported between 2 environments by using the virtual HMD, and a negative association for those who were transported through doors. Finally, four of the subjects moved their real left arm to match movement of the left arm of the virtual body displayed by the system. These four scored significantly higher on the kinesthetic representation system than the remainder of the subjects.])>