Abstract
Presence is used to assess the subjective experience of being in one place when physically situated in another. Recently, the research on presence has gained increasing attention due to the wide use of immersive audio technologies. Currently, the most widely-used measurement of presence is based on post-experiment self-report questionnaires. It is reliable but imperfect due to the psychological changes caused by the act of answering the questionnaire when immersed in the virtual environment. Therefore, the present work aims to find an objective way to measure presence, and electroencephalography (EEG) was investigated as a possible tool for this objective measurement. In this study, two listening tests were conducted, where eight loudspeakers were used to reproduce urban soundscapes to stimulate auditory presence. Presence was measured by both questionnaires and EEG. Results showed a significant correlation between T/B (Theta/Beta Ratio) extracted from EEG and subjective presence levels assessed by questionnaires, suggesting the possible use of EEG to measure presence objectively. This study could bring some insight for the research of presence, and related technologies, such as VR, video games and immersive audio production.
Highlights
Presence is used to assess the participants’ sense of “being there” in the virtual environment [1]
We investigated the correlation between presence score by subjective questionnaires and EEG indices by objective measurements. Considering both the results of the McNemar test and the Pearson correlation coefficient, we found that among all EEG indices used in this study, only T/B showed a significant correlation with the presence score
(Theta/Beta Ratio) extracted from EEG signal showed significant differences between programs, and demonstrated a significant correlation with the presence score after the data transformation. This indicates that the results of EEG measurement, together with subjective measurement both showed significant differences between different loudspeaker setups, and they were correlated to a great extent
Summary
Presence is used to assess the participants’ sense of “being there” in the virtual environment [1]. It can be defined explicitly as the subjective experience of being in one place or environment, even when physically situated in another [2]. Many researchers have assessed presence earlier, but most of them focused on the visual aspect of the stimuli, for example, the size and resolution of the screen [6], or the visual fidelity of the animation [7]. Regarding research focusing on the auditory cues of presence [8,9,10,11,12,13], most experiments still used visual display to accompany auditory stimuli. The audio stimuli these researchers used were mostly stereophonic or binaural recordings, whereas a loudspeaker array is used in the present work
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