Place Illusion Research Articles

Investigating the Correlation Between Presence and Reaction Time in Mixed Reality.

Measuring presence is critical to improving user involvement and performance in Mixed Reality (MR). Presence, a crucial aspect of MR, is traditionally gauged using subjective questionnaires, leading to a lack of time-varying responses and susceptibility to user bias. Inspired by the existing literature on the relationship between presence and human performance, the proposed methodology systematically measures a user's reaction time to a visual stimulus as they interact within a manipulated MR environment. We explore the user reaction time as a quantity that can be easily measured using the systemic tools available in modern MR devices. We conducted an exploratory study (N = 40) with two experiments designed to alter the users' sense of presence by manipulating place illusion and plausibility illusion. We found a significant correlation between presence scores and reaction times with a correlation coefficient -0.65, suggesting that users with a higher sense of presence responded more swiftly to stimuli. We develop a model that estimates a user's presence level using the reaction time values with high accuracy of up to 80%. While our study suggests that reaction time can be used as a measure of presence, further investigation is needed to improve the accuracy of the model.

The Instructional Design of Place and Past

Extended reality (XR) can provide insights into the past, allowing learners to visualize history while helping them to sustain an inquiry by leveraging the concepts of “engagement first,” place illusion, and plausibility illusion. Using three cases of XR-based historical inquiries focusing on hidden or difficult histories (Christiansburg Institute – a former African-American school, Solitude – a university campus building that is a former plantation, and Vauquois – a First World War site in rural France), we describe the six principles that guide our instructional design process to enhance users and students’ engagement with historical places and historical sources as part of the process of engaging in historical inquiry.

So far yet so near: Exploring the effects of immersion, presence, and psychological distance on empathy and prosocial behavior

Immersive media are often lauded for their ability to induce empathy and encourage prosocial behavior, yet the theoretical mechanisms underlying why immersion may lead to such effects remain underexplored. Guided by the Construal Level Theory (CLT), we propose two separate mediation routes to explain the relationship between immersion and prosocial behavior: place illusion route and self-plausibility route. An experiment with three immersion conditions (high immersion: immersive virtual reality; moderate immersion: 360-degree video in headset; and low immersion: 360-degree video on desktop) was conducted among university undergraduates (N = 244) to investigate the effects of immersion on presence, psychological distance, empathy, and intention to donate and volunteer. Results found support for the place illusion route, where the relationship between immersion and intention to volunteer and donate were serially mediated via physical presence, spatial distance, and empathy. Although the self-plausibility route was not supported, self-presence was positively correlated with empathy and intention to volunteer and donate. Our findings highlight the effectiveness of CLT in explaining the relationship between immersion and prosocial behavior, offering a novel approach to understanding the psychological effects of immersive media and their societal implications.

Body Epistemes

This research concerns the relationships among space, story, and body in nonfictional Virtual Reality (VR) projects with the user as a first-person protagonist. What was once called immersive journalism (i.e., attempting to offer users physical experiences of factual journalism) has become increasingly film-oriented over the last five years with the further development of head-mounted displays for the consumer market. As such, projects often tell stories that relate to reality and allow protagonists to enter realistic narratives. Mel Slater has investigated VR projects since 2005, analyzing factors such as place illusion (PI) and plausibility illusion (Psi). In later writings, Slater expanded his research to include the body-oriented sense of embodiment (SoE) (Slater 2009; Slater et al. 2010; De La Pena et al. 2010; Kilteni et al. 2012). Since nonfictional VR mostly tells a story in the direction of the users, incorporating them into the story design, the effects of narration also should be considered. Domenic Arsénault (2005) noted three levels of narrative immersion in VR when dealing with narrative projects. Considering this, it is possible to develop a four-level matrix including place, plausibility, body perception, and narration. Starting in 2020, a Graduate student research project at the University of Leipzig was set up using this matrix to analyse four current examples for a small, non-representative study of twenty-four participants. Our findings demonstrate that space and story in first-person VR experiences are very important, while the installation of plausibility and coherence is less significant. The connecting factor of these two levels is one's own body. Users read, experience, and understand projects with their senses, perceptions, and cognition, making a discussion of an episteme of the body possible. Thus, stories from real life are not conveyed indirectly but experienced directly and personally.

Immersive Journalism: The Effect of System Immersion on Place Illusion and Co-Presence in 360-Degree Video Reporting

Immersive journalism has been promoted as an alternative way of producing content that allows users to experience first-hand the events depicted in the news story. This mixed-method study examines how immersive journalism impacts the user experience of non-fictional narratives in news practices. A between-subject experiment (n = 104) was conducted to inspect the effects of system immersion on place illusion and co-presence. Using a 360-degree video news report produced by the Spanish newspaper El País as a stimulus, two viewing conditions were compared: magic window and 360 degree with a VR headset. The results show that VR technologies determine the effective potential of immersive journalism, namely the experience of place illusion and co-presence and that audiences do not actually explore the so-called whole picture, as a 90–180° movement for exploration prevailed.

A Qualitative Case Study on Deconstructing Presence for Young Adults and Older Adults

Abstract In this paper, we present the results of an exploratory qualitative case study on presence experienced by groups of young adults and older adults during their use of an interactive virtual reality application mixing realistic and fantasy elements. In contrast to most previous studies, we do not focus on a set of predetermined factors but instead adopt an open-ended qualitative approach to identify emerging factors from the users' experiences. We then analyze these factors against the place illusion/plausibility illusion (PI/PSI) framework of Skarbez, Neyret, et al. (2017) to investigate whether PI and PSI, as well as their contributing factors, can be separated. According to our findings, a user can experience PI and PSI independently from each other; however, they often appeared intermixed when investigated on the scope of the whole experience. Breaks in presence, as well as breaks in plausibility, could mostly, but not entirely, be attributed to immersion and coherence factors, respectively. An interesting finding is that both participant groups turned out to have two subgroups interpreting their experience with a particular frame of reference of differing expectations. These frames of reference affected not only PSI, as expected, but PI as well, suggesting that coherence could be a contributing factor to both PI and PSI. Our contribution adds to the relatively small body of research investigating the separation of PI and PSI. Our exploratory findings can be utilized as directions for designing future confirmatory studies.

Spatial audio and immersive journalism: production, narrative design, and sense of presence

This article presents the findings from an experimental study on the use of binaural audio in two long-form journalistic features broadcast on Portuguese radio. From a production and narrative design perspective, our objective is to examine whether/how binaural audio implies a transformation of previously established news radio production work principles and practices, as well as of storytelling ideation and techniques. From a user experience viewpoint, we examine whether the use of binaural audio translates into higher levels of self-reported immersion and place illusion (n = 77). Despite the spread of new audio journalism formats, media and communication studies have until now largely neglected the role of spatial audio in the construction of immersion and the illusion of place. We argue that this epistemic omission translates into an image-centric conception and operationalization of the immersive journalism proposal, which stands out as a knowledge gap regarding the work of journalistic storytellers and relating to participants’ actual experience. The original contribution of this article is threefold: (1) conceptual, by broadening the perspective of journalism studies’ scholars and media professionals on the concept of immersive journalism, which, in our view, is often incorrectly considered to be synonymous with that of virtual reality journalism; (2) practical, by generating a more nuanced understanding of how actual practitioners perceive and employ immersive journalism; (3) phenomenological, by developing an examination of the factors that influence listeners’ ultimate perception of the immersive experience.

A Separate Reality: An Update on Place Illusion and Plausibility in Virtual Reality

We review the concept of presence in virtual reality, normally thought of as the sense of “being there” in the virtual world. We argued in a 2009 paper that presence consists of two orthogonal illusions that we refer to as Place Illusion (PI, the illusion of being in the place depicted by the VR) and Plausibility (Psi, the illusion that the virtual situations and events are really happening). Both are with the proviso that the participant in the virtual reality knows for sure that these are illusions. Presence (PI and Psi) together with the illusion of ownership over the virtual body that self-represents the participant, are the three key illusions of virtual reality. Copresence, togetherness with others in the virtual world, can be a consequence in the context of interaction between remotely located participants in the same shared virtual environments, or between participants and virtual humans. We then review several different methods of measuring presence: questionnaires, physiological and behavioural measures, breaks in presence, and a psychophysics method based on transitions between different system configurations. Presence is not the only way to assess the responses of people to virtual reality experiences, and we present methods that rely solely on participant preferences, including the use of sentiment analysis that allows participants to express their experience in their own words rather than be required to adopt the terminology and concepts of researchers. We discuss several open questions and controversies that exist in this field, providing an update to the 2009 paper, in particular with respect to models of Plausibility. We argue that Plausibility is the most interesting and complex illusion to understand and is worthy of significant more research. Regarding measurement we conclude that the ideal method would be a combination of a psychophysical method and qualitative methods including sentiment analysis.

Congruence and Plausibility, Not Presence: Pivotal Conditions for XR Experiences and Effects, a Novel Approach

Presence is often considered the most important quale describing the subjective feeling of being in a computer-generated and/or computer-mediated virtual environment. The identification and separation of orthogonal presence components, i.e., the place illusion and the plausibility illusion, has been an accepted theoretical model describing Virtual Reality (VR) experiences for some time. This perspective article challenges this presence-oriented VR theory. First, we argue that a place illusion cannot be the major construct to describe the much wider scope of virtual, augmented, and mixed reality (VR, AR, MR: or XR for short). Second, we argue that there is no plausibility illusion but merely plausibility, and we derive the place illusion caused by the congruent and plausible generation of spatial cues and similarly for all the current model’s so-defined illusions. Finally, we propose congruence and plausibility to become the central essential conditions in a novel theoretical model describing XR experiences and effects.

Epistemics of the Body

This presentation is about the relationship between the factors of space, story and body in non-fictional VR projects with the user as a first-person protagonist. What used to be called immersive journalism, i.e., the attempt to offer the user physical experiences of factual journalism, has now become much more film-oriented in the last years. Most projects, therefore, tell stories that have a relation to reality and allow the protagonists to enter real-life narratives. The paper starts by focusing on the state of the art of research from the direction of media and information science. Mel Slater has been investigating VR projects with others since 2005, naming factors such as place illusion or plausibility illusion; in later writings, he expanded this to include the body-oriented sense of embodiment (SoE) (Slater et al. 2009, 2010a, 2010b, 2012). These methodological explanations are supplemented by the immersion effect of the story itself. Domenic Arsénault pointed out there are three levels of narrative immersion in VR (Arsénault 2005). From this, an integrative matrix is developed. In the following, four current examples are presented that were used for the research project. The results of a small, non-representative study with 24 participants are presented afterwards. The findings include, among other things, that both the space and the story in first-person VR are related to the user's body, while the installation of a working plausibility illusion is rather insignificant. The user reads, experiences and understands the projects with the senses, perceptions and cognition of the whole body, as it seems, which makes it possible to speak of an epistemic of the body.

Perspective: Does Realism Improve Presence in VR? Suggesting a Model and Metric for VR Experience Evaluation

The concepts of “immersion” and “presence” have been considered as staple metrics for evaluating the quality of virtual reality experiences for more than five decades, even as the concepts themselves have evolved in terms of both technical and psychological aspects. To enhance the user’s experience, studies have investigated the impact of different visual, auditory, and haptic stimuli in various contexts to mainly explore the concepts of “plausibility illusion” and “place illusion”. Previous research has sometimes shown a positive correlation between increased realism and an increase in presence, but not always, and thus, very little of the work around the topic of presence reports an unequivocal correlation. Indeed, one might classify the overall findings within the field around presence as “messy”. Better (or more) visual, auditory, or haptic cues, or increased agency, may lead to increased realism, but not necessarily increased presence, and may well depend on the application context. Rich visual and audio cues in concert contribute significantly to both realism and presence, but the addition of tactile cues, gesture input support, or a combination of these might improve realism, but not necessarily presence. In this paper, we review previous research and suggest a possible theory to better define the relationship between increases in sensory-based realism and presence, and thus help VR researchers create more effective experiences.

A Pilot Study of the Impact of Virtually Embodying a Patient with a Terminal Illness.

Compassionate end-of-life care matters deeply for patients and their caregivers, but studies continue to demonstrate ways in which physicians fall short. Despite specific training during medical school, many patients report lack of empathy in their providers with respect to end-of-life conversations. This is likely because empathy is simply hard to teach. Numerous activities have been tried to combat the decline in empathy during medical training with little to moderate success. However, virtual reality, which allows users to viscerally experience anything from another person's point of view, could be a game changer for building empathy within medicine. This type of perspective-taking has previously shown to improve understanding, reduce biases, facilitate empathy, and promote prosocial behaviors. In this pilot study, virtual reality was used to allow students to "become a patient" virtually embodying their daily activities, symptoms, and interactions with caregivers. Using the Embodied Labs modules, first-year medical students were able to experience first-hand having a terminal illness, being told no further treatments are available and witnessing loved ones' reactions. Data generated through surveys and reflections indicated a high level of place illusion, plausibility, and embodiment of users. This high level of immersion generated an increase in comfortability with talking about end-of-life issues, produced a better understanding of what patients and their families experience, and promoted a change in the way students would approach clinical skills. Analysis of reflections indicated a high level of empathy for the patient and his family members. Overall, the activity was highly received by students as a valuable learning activity. As such, we propose that virtual reality could be a useful pedagogical tool to facilitate empathy and clinical skills within medical education.

Self-Illusion: A Study on Cognition of Role-Playing in Immersive Virtual Environments

We present the design and results of an experiment investigating the occurrence of self-illusion and its contribution to realistic behavior consistent with a virtual role in virtual environments. Self-illusion is a generalized illusion about one's self in cognition, eliciting a sense of being associated with a role in a virtual world, despite sure knowledge that this role is not the actual self in the real world. We validate and measure self-illusion through an experiment where each participant occupies a non-human perspective and plays a non-human role using this role's behavior patterns. 77 participants were enrolled for the user study according to the priori power analysis. In the mixed-design experiment with different levels of manipulations, we asked the participants to play a cat (a non-human role) within an immersive VE and captured their different kinds of responses, finding that the participants with higher self-illusion can connect themselves to the virtual role more easily. Based on statistical analysis of questionnaires and behavior data, there is some evidence that self-illusion can be considered a novel psychological component of presence because it is dissociated from sense of embodiment (SoE), plausibility illusion (Psi), and place illusion (PI). Moreover, self-illusion has the potential to be an effective evaluation metric for user experience in a virtual reality system for certain applications.

A Virtual Reality Simulation of Drug Users' Everyday Life: The Effect of Supported Sensorimotor Contingencies on Empathy.

Perspective taking techniques have been used to transport people into imaginary situations and the lives of others. Virtual Reality provides an immersive way to virtually experience the lives of stigmatized by society members. Through the support of sensorimotor contingencies, people can use natural movements to view and interact with the virtual world around them. In this study, we compared a perspective-taking immersive Virtual Reality system which supports a number of sensorimotor contingencies (SC group) with a perspective-taking desktop system of the same application but without support of any sensorimotor contingencies (NSC group), to investigate the effect of the supported sensorimotor contingencies in promoting empathy and positive attitudes toward drug users. Results demonstrate a strong correlation between closeness to the drug user and empathy in the SC group. In both groups there were a within group significant change in their reported attitudes before and after their exposure. Finally, participants in the SC condition reported significantly higher levels of Place Illusion (PI), body ownership, agency and plausibility of people. Further research is needed to investigate how sensorimotor contingencies can be exploited to the fullest to be used as an effective method to induce empathy and change attitudes toward stigmatized by society people.

Conceptual knowledge and sensitization on Asperger's syndrome based on the constructivist approach through virtual reality

The immense capabilities provided by virtual reality for enhancing empathy and altering social behaviors, make it possible to use virtual reality for the promotion of the understanding between individuals. A social issue that needs to be addressed is the discrimination and marginalization of people with Asperger's syndrome (AS) from the working force, stemming from the lack of recognition and justification of their oddities. In this paper, the effectiveness of a virtual reality simulation, raising awareness on this specific issue, is evaluated. Awareness is a term used in this research to refer to the combination of conceptual knowledge and sensitization on a specific issue. An experiment with between-group design has been carried out, where half of the participants used the simulation via a VR headset device and the other half was given a transcript of relevant medical articles instead. The comparison between the two groups indicates that the group which used the simulation gained more knowledge on AS than the group which used the transcript. Moreover, the parameter of sensitization indicates positive correlations with place illusion in the VR group.

Immersion and Coherence: Research Agenda and Early Results.

Presence has been studied in the context of virtual environments for nearly thirty years, but the field has yet to reach consensus on even basic issues of definition and measurement, and there are many open research questions. We gather many of these open research questions and systematically group them according to what we believe are five key constructs that inform user experience in virtual environments: immersion, coherence, Place Illusion, Plausibility Illusion, and presence. We also report on the design and results of a study that investigated the effects of immersion and coherence on user experience in a stressful virtual visual cliff environment. In this article, each participant experienced a given VE in one of four conditions chosen from a 2x2 design: high or low levels of immersion and high or low levels of coherence. We collected both questionnaire-based and physiological metrics. Several existing presence questionnaires could not reliably distinguish the effects of immersion from those of coherence. They did, however, indicate that high levels of both together result in higher presence, compared any of the other three conditions. This suggests that "breaks in PI" and "breaks in Psi" belong to a broader category of "breaks in experience," any of which result in a degraded user experience. Participants' heart rates responded markedly differently in the two coherence conditions; no such difference was observed across the immersion conditions. This indicates that a VE that exhibits unusual or confusing behavior can cause stress in a user that affects physiological responses, and that one must take care to eliminate such confusing behaviors if one is using physiological measurement as a proxy for subjective experience in a VE.

Is Photorealism Important for Perception of Expressive Virtual Humans in Virtual Reality?

In recent years, the quality of real-time rendering has reached new heights—realistic reflections, physically based materials, and photometric lighting are all becoming commonplace in modern game engines and even interactive virtual environments, such as virtual reality (VR). As the strive for realism continues, there is a need to investigate the effect of photorealism on users’ perception, particularly for interactive, emotional scenarios in VR. In this article, we explored three main topics, where we predicted photorealism will make a difference: the illusion of being present with the virtual person and in an environment, altered emotional response toward the character, and a subtler response—comfort of being in close proximity to the character. We present a perceptual experiment, with an interactive expressive virtual character in VR, which was designed to induce particular social responses in people. Our participant pool was large (N = 797) and diverse in terms of demographics. We designed a between-group experiment, where each group saw either the realistic rendering or one of our stylized conditions (simple and sketch style), expressing one of three attitudes: Friendly, Unfriendly, or Sad. While the render style did not particularly effect the level of comfort with the character or increase the illusion of presence with it, our main finding shows that the photorealistic character changed the emotional responses of participants, compared to the stylized versions. We also found a preference for realism in VR, reflected in the affinity and higher place illusion in the scenario, rendered in the realistic render style.

A Novel Integrated Information Processing Model of Presence

AbstractThe objective of this article is to conduct a narrative literature review on multisensory integration and propose a novel information processing model of presence in virtual reality (VR). The first half of the article introduces basic multisensory integration (implicit information processing) and the integration of coherent stimuli (explicit information processing) in the physical environment, offering an explanation for people's reactions during VR immersions and is an important component of our model. To help clarify these concepts, examples are provided. The second half of the article addresses multisensory integration in VR. Three models in the literature examine the role that multisensory integration plays in inducing various perceptual illusions and the relationship between embodiment and presence in VR. However, they do not relate specifically to presence and multisensory integration. We propose a novel model of presence using elements of these models and suggest that implicit and explicit information processing lead to presence. We refer to presence as a perceptual illusion that includes a plausibility illusion (the feeling that the scenario in the virtual environment is actually occurring) and a place illusion (the feeling of being in the place depicted in the virtual environment), based on efficient and congruent multisensory integration.

Investigating learning outcomes and subjective experiences in 360-degree videos

Virtual Reality experiences, particularly the 360-degree video, have become popular in recent years for creating immersive educational experiences. However, much is still unknown regarding the educational effectiveness of this medium. Here we examined pre-to-post changes in well-being, simulator sickness, and learning outcomes across four devices of varying levels of immersion: a smartphone, Google Cardboard, Oculus Rift DK2, and Oculus CV1 using a space-themed 360° educational video. More immersive devices induced greater induction of place illusion, greater positive affect, and better learning outcomes while demonstrating low prevalence of simulator sickness. Greater immersion was also associated with an increased interest in learning more about the video's subject-matter. On the other hand, less immersive technology led to increased simulation sickness which may have led to suboptimal educational experiences. Overall, we found support for the hypothesis that highly immersive experiences using 360° videos provide positive educational experiences while minimizing simulator sickness.

A Survey of Presence and Related Concepts

The presence construct, most commonly defined as the sense of “being there,” has driven research and development of virtual environments (VEs) for decades. Despite that, there is not widespread agreement on how to define or operationalize this construct. The literature contains many different definitions of presence and many proposed measures for it. This article reviews many of the definitions, measures, and models of presence from the literature. We also review several related constructs, including social presence, copresence, immersion, agency, transportation, reality judgment, and embodiment. In addition, we present a meta-analysis of existing presence models and propose a model of presence informed by Slater’s Place Illusion and Plausibility Illusion constructs.