From: John Draper <draperjv@ornl.gov>
Subject: Re: HUMAN-FACTORS: Immersion Studies
Date: Mon, 09 Sep 1996 09:39:22 -0400
Message-ID: <32341E09.7A75@ornl.gov>
Organization: Oak Ridge National Laboratory


Tim Poston wrote:
> 
> Strange, all this emphasis on how much the user _feels_
> part of the virtual world.  "What sort of trip did it give you?"
> Even a suggestion of hypnosis.  (You are falling under my spell.
> You will buy my VR system...)
> 
> I would rather ask,
>     How effectively can the user act in the virtual world?
> 
> If you can't act on things you find in a world,
> you are poorly connected to it.
> A tawdry sort of immersion.

This is an excellent point, particularly since there is no evidence of
performance benefits accruing from presence (Sheridan, 1992; Draper &
Blair, 1996). There is also some evidence that characteristics of VR
often associated with immersion and presence can produce simulator
sickness (Kolasinski, 1995). These include stereoscopic viewing, wide
field of view, and motion through the VE. I have been particularly
puzzled by the way that telepresence seems to captivate the
telerobotics community.  The idea seems counterproductive in some
applications, imposes an a priori design ideal, and doesn't seem to
have much explanatory power (Draper, 1995).

A note on terminology: I like to use immersion as Biocca & Delaney
(1995) define it, "the degree to which a virtual environment submerges
the perceptual systems of the user in computer-generated stimuli."
Then, presence in a VR and telepresence in teleoperation have to do
with "the person perceives that he or she is physically present in a
remote environment" (Schloerb, 1995); "compelling illusion" or "a
subjective sensation" (Sheridan, 1992); "the (suspension of dis-)
belief that they are in a world other than where their real bodies are
located" (Slater & Usoh, 1993); "the experience of presence in an
environment by means of a communication medium" (Steuer, 1992);
"subjective experience of being in one place when one is physically in
another" (Witmer & Singer, 1994); and "sense of being in and of the
world" (Zeltzer, 1992). In sum, immersion has to do with how well the
synthetic environment system controls user simulation and presence has
to do with the subjective reaction to the SE. This may be a bit
idiosyncratic; most of the world seems to user presence and immersion
interchangeably.

References

Biocca, F., & Delaney, B. (1995). Immersive virtual reality technology.
In F. Biocca & M. R. Levy (Eds.), Communication in the Age of Virtual
Reality (pp. 57-124). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Draper, J. V. (1995). Teleoperators for advanced manufacturing:
applications and human factors challenges. International Journal of
Human Factors in Manufacturing, 5(1), 53-85.

Draper, J. V., & Blair, L. M. (1996). Workload, flow, and telepresence
during teleoperation, Proceedings of the 1996 IEEE International
Conference on Robotics and Automation . Minneapolis, MN: IEEE Robotics
and Automation Society.

Kolasinski, E. M. (1995). Simulator sickness in virtual environments
(Technical Report 1027). Alexandria, VA: Army Research Institute for the
Behavioral and Social Sciences.

Schloerb, D. W. (1995). A quantitative measure of telepresence.
Presence, 4(1), 64-80.

Sheridan, T. B. (1992). Telerobotics, Automation, and Human Supervisory
Control. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Slater, M., & Usoh, M. (1993). Representation systems, perceptual
position, and presence in immersive virtual environments. Presence,
2(3), 221-233.

Steuer, J. (1992). Defining Virtual Reality: Dimensions Determining
Telepresence. Journal of Communications, 42(4), 73-93.

Witmer, B. G., & Singer, M. J. (1994). Measuring Immersion in Virtual
Environments (Technical Report 1014). Alexandria, VA: U.S. Army Research
Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences.

Zeltzer, D. (1992). Autonomy, interaction, and presence. Presence, 1(1),
127-132.

-- 
Dr. John V. Draper, Ph.D.      | We shape our dwellings, 
Robotics & Process Systems Div.| and afterwards our dwellings 
Oak Ridge National Laboratory  | shape us. -- W.S. Churchill
e-mail: draperjv@ornl.gov      |