The Influence of Body Movement on Subjective Presence in Virtual Environments

Abstract

We describe an experiment to assess the influence of body movements on presence in a virtual environment. In the experiment 20 participants were to walk through a virtual field of trees and count the trees with diseased leaves. A 2 × 2 between-subjects design was used to assess the influence of two factors on presence: tree height variation and task complexity. The field with greater variation in tree height required participants to bend down and look up more than in the lower variation tree height field. In the higher complexity task participants were told to remember the distribution of diseased trees in the field as well as to count them. The results showed a significant positive association between reported presence and the amount of body movement - in particular, head yaw - and the extent to which participants bent down and stood up. There was also a strong interaction effect between task complexity and gender: Women in the morecomplex task reported a much lower sense of presence than in the simpler task. For applications in which presence is an important requirement, the research in this paper suggests that presence will be increased when interaction techniques are employed that permit the user to engage in whole-body movement.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Barfield, W. , & Weghorst, S. (1993). The sense of presence within virtual environments: A conceptual framework. In G. Salvendy & M. Smith (Eds.), Human-computer interaction: Software and hardware interfaces (Vol. B, pp. 699–704). Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Barfield, W. , & Hendrix, C. (1995). The effect of update rate on the sense of presence within virtual environments. Virtual Reality: The Journal of the Virtual Reality Society, 1, 3–16.

Ellis, S. R. (1996). Presence of mind: A reaction to Thomas Sheridan's “Further musings on the psychophysics of presence.” Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 5, 247–250.

Heeter, C. (1992). Being there: The subjective experience of presence. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 1, 262–271.

Held, R. M. , & Durlach, N. I. (1992). Telepresence. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 1, 109–112.

Hendrix, C. , & Barfield, W. (1996a). Presence within virtual environments as a function of visual display parameters. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 5, 274–289.

Hendrix, C. , & Barfield, W. (1996b). The sense of presence within auditory environments. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 5, 290–301.

Hodges, L. F. , Rothbaum, B. O. , Watson, B. , Kessler, G. D. , & Opdyke, D. (1996). A virtual airplane for fear of flying therapy. In Proceedings of the IEEE 1996 Virtual Reality Annual International Symposium (pp. 86–94). Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society Press.

Loomis, J. M. (1992). Presence and distal attribution: Phenomenology, determinants, and assessment. In Proceedings of the SPIE: Human Vision, Visual Processing and Digital Display III (Vol. 1666, pp. 590–594). Bellingham, WA: International Society for Optical Engineering.

10.

McCullagh, P. , & Nelder, J. A. (1983). Generalized linear models. New York: Chapman and Hall.

11.

Sheridan, T. B. (1992). Musings on telepresence and virtual presence. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 1, 120–126.

12.

Sheridan, T. B. (1996). Further musings on the psychophysics of presence. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 5, 241–246.

13.

Slater, M. , & Usoh, M. (1994). Body centered interaction in immersive virtual environments. In N. M. Thalmann & D. Thalmann (Eds.), Artificial life and virtual reality (pp. 125–148). New York: Wiley.

14.

Slater, M. , Usoh, M. , & Steed, A. (1994). Depth of presence in immersive virtual environments. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 3, 130–144.

15.

Slater, M. , Usoh, M. , & Steed, A. (1995). Taking steps: The influence of a walking metaphor on presence in virtual reality. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 2, 201–219.

16.

Slater, M. , & Wilbur, S. (1997). A framework for immersive virtual environments (FIVE): Speculations on the role of presence in virtual environments. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 6, 603–616.

17.

Steuer, J. (1992). Defining virtual reality: Dimensions determining telepresence. Journal of Communication, 42(4), 73–93.

18.

Welch, R. B. , Blackman, T. T. , Liu, A. , Mellers, B. A. , & Stark, L. W. (1996). The effects of pictorial realism, delay of visual feedback, and observer interactivity on the subjective sense of presence. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 5, 263–273.

19.

Witmer, B. G. , Singer, M. J. (1998). Measuring presence in virtual environments: A presence questionnaire. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 7, 225–240.

20.

Zeltzer, D. (1992) Autonomy, interaction and presence. Telepresence, Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 1, 127–132.