Presence Questionnaire

For a discussion of presence questionnaires in general, see Section 2.3.3.

With minor variations for scene differences, the following questionnaire was used in the foreground occlusion reported presence experiments described in Chapter 5 and in Appendix C; and in the visual-inertial nulling experiments of Chapter 4 and in Appendix B. Reported presence was measured by taking the average of the responses to the below questions.

1.

In sharkworld, I felt like ... (1 = I was standing in the laboratory, wearing a virtual reality helmet.) (7 = I was in some sort of ocean, near a shark-infested shipwreck.)

2.

How real did the virtual world seem to you? (1 = about as real as an imagined world.) (7 = indistinguishable from the real world.)

3.

To what extent were there times when you felt that the virtual world became the "reality" for you, and you almost forgot about the real world outside? (1 = at no time.) (7 = almost all the time.)

4.

Did the virtual world seem more like something you saw or someplace you visited? (1 = something I saw.) (7 = some place I visited.)

5.

Did the virtual world seem more like a picture or more like a scene looked at through a window? (1 = like a picture.) (7 = like looking through a window.)

As the above questions produced similar patterns of responses, and since a shorter questionnaire was desired which could be conveniently used during exposure, rather than as a post-test, the experiments described in Chapter 4 relied on a version of the first question. This question appears to most readily capture the informal description of presence as the sense of ``being someplace''. (See the ``presence hypothesis'', Section 3.3.3.)