Studying presence in a Virtual Cave:

Factors, Measurement, and Virtual Reality Environment.
Research work by Nour Sharkasi

Virtual reality VR could be defined as the science of illusion. The goal is to create a virtual world where users could be immersed in. To be classified as virtual reality, an application should be interactive in the sense that users can interact with objects or inhabitants of the synthetic world. The presence and especially the sense of presence could be seen as a quality measurement estimator. The problem with presence is that it’s quite difficult to have a fair evaluation of it as it is subjective. The degree of presence can be influenced by divers factors. The objective of my experiment is to analyze interactions of effects of immersion and pictorial realism PR on the sense of presence. The main three questions of this study are: Which kind of ‘presence’ are we talking about, what is the most appropriate way of measuring it, and, finally, how reliable are the measurements of the study? The former two questions are closely interlinked and can be answered with respect to the objective and constraints of the experiments.(Ongoing research work).