Abstract
Assessing and modelling the quality of immersive experience has become a trending topic in QoE. To achieve this purpose, we would firstly want to know why an immersive experience is important to us, what exactly is defined as an immersive experience, and how we could actually measure an immersive experience. This paper aims to answer these questions. We start from the rationales of designing immersive experience, and then briefly go through the definitions of immersion from the system and user perspectives. We also provide our own definition of immersion that fits into the QoE assessment and measurement paradigm. We continue to discuss the pros and cons of four popular measurements of immersion, namely, the psychometric questionnaires, the continuous subjective measures, the primary or secondary task performance, and the neuro-psycho-physiological methods. We also provide a global view of comparing and evaluating these measurements by profiling them along five quality dimensions. Finally, we postulate, briefly, four novel methods of measuring immersion, linking the definitions and theories of immersion with the measurements we have discussed in this paper.
Highlights
Despite decades of presence research, the question of precisely framing the phenomenon of immersion or presence still remains unclear
Assessing and modelling the quality of immersive experience has become a trending topic in Quality of Experience (QoE), and ‘‘designing for immersion’’ (DfI) is a primary goal that the media producers are fervently chasing
We provide our own definition of immersion that fits into the QoE assessment and measurement paradigm
Summary
Despite decades of presence research, the question of precisely framing the phenomenon of immersion or presence still remains unclear. Turner et al [15] consider immersion as ‘‘being positively associated with the degree of technologically-mediated sensory richness that facilitates isolation or decoupling from the real world.’’ Slater and Wilbur [16] define immersion as being the extent to which a computerized system is capable of offering to the user the illusion of reality at once being: (1) inclusive (with attentional resources and sensory modalities fully engaged with the virtual world, and information from the physical reality completely cut off, suspended or isolated); (2) vast or extensive (with the virtual world providing simulation that accommodates and adapts to a whole repertoire of sensory modalities); (3) surrounding (meaning that a system offers a virtual environment that is panoramic rather than being limited to a narrow field of vision, i.e., a field of view from all virtual directions); and (4) vivid (meaning that the fidelity of the stimuli is sharp and rich to provide high-quality information, content and interface); and (5) matching (with each sensory modality of the stimuli consistent with one another and altogether providing an experience that is congruent to real-life scenarios) To create this illusion, the system needs to be able to elicit adequate sense of ‘‘perceived realness’’. Our brief definition of immersion in the virtual reality that fits into the QoE assessment paradigm is as follows: Immersion in a virtual environment is a technologymediated illusion that, through mimetic system offering priming stimuli and cues, engulfs one’s senses and leads to the alignment of one’s attentional focus to a synthetic yet perceptually authentic reality, by taking the visuo-spatial and emotional perspectives of the virtual agent(s), depending on one’s imaginative facilities and mental dispositions and tendencies
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