[Master’s thesis] A Case-study of Contemporary Presence Theory

After returning from my yearlong study abroad in Sheffield (England), I built on my British master’s thesis during my German master’s thesis and worked on a Doctoral Consortium paper submission to IEEE VR, the largest international conference on virtual reality. This included designing and conducting an experiment with 37 participants in collaboration with Sheffield Hallam University and developing statistical analyses of VR head movements. The aim of this work can be summarized as follows:

A substantial body of literature is concerned with models of presence—the sensory illusion of being part of a virtual scene—but there is still no general agreement on how to measure it in an objective and reliable way. For the presented case-study, contemporary theory was reviewed and applied in order to measure presence in the context of a comparison between continuous locomotion and teleportation in virtual reality. Thirty-seven participants played through an existing virtual environment of commercial quality, in which they had to collect several hidden items. Real-time assessments of presence were repeatedly collected using a single-item questionnaire, and in order to analyse dependencies, a post-study presence questionnaire had to be completed after the experience. Furthermore, three special events were naturally embedded in the environment in order to evoke physical reactions and behavioural measures of presence were collected in the form of head and controller tracking data in response to these events. The results suggest that there is no significant difference in presence between the two compared locomotion techniques. However, as a more objective way of measuring presence than questionnaires and a less intrusive way than most physiological measures, behavioural measures are currently considered an important field of presence research (Skarbez, 2017). This thesis also presents a novel approach to employing and analysing behavioural measures.

You can read my full thesis here.

Feel free to use any of the offered materials in your own work with the following (BibLaTeX) citation:

@inproceedings{2019-Schirm-PresenceCaseStudy,
  author    = {Johannes Schirm},
  title     = {[DC] Case-studies of Contemporary Presence Theory: Towards More Objective and Reliable Measures of Presence},
  booktitle = {2019 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR)},
  year      = {2019},
  month     = {Mar},
  location  = {Osaka, Japan},
  pages     = {1363-1364},
  doi       = {10.1109/VR.2019.8798203},
  issn      = {2642-5246},
}