002. Presence in Virtual Reality

Transcript

A term you’ll often hear in the virtual reality space is “presence”. You’ll encounter it everywhere - in conversation, in marketing collateral, and in blog and news articles. But what you might not realize is that sometimes “presence” and “immersion” are used interchangeably, and incorrectly.

And honestly when I started out, I probably, more than likely, contributed to this problem. I’d throw it in a sentence and think, well yeah that sounds about right. And this is not an excuse, but in my experience, it was really kind of confusing and difficult to pinpoint the exact definition when you’re only trying to extrapolate it from conversation or media, and I wish I would have dived into the literature sooner to clarify my understanding of the whole topic. But here we are and here’s this video where I share my findings so you don’t have to do all that. So let’s get to it.

Nilsson, Nordahl, & Serafin (2016) published a review stating that presence is a person’s subjective experience when interacting within virtual environments; this includes feeling like you’re actually present in the space even though you may be physically located elsewhere.

So the feeling of presence is believing that what you’re experiencing virtually, is real even though it isn't (Slater, 2018). [And I will actually caveat that and say, physically real — David Chalmers makes a great argument in his book Reality + that the things we experience in virtual reality are just as real as anything else we experience so this can actually be considered genuine reality. But I digress..]

When you wear a headset and the CGI projects into your eyes a completely different scenery all around you, you begin to feel as if you’re actually present in that location, even when physically you may be sitting on your couch, that is presence. So presence is defined as the sense of being in an environment.

Now you might also have heard to term “telepresence”. And some folks do use these two terms interchangeably.

In 1980, Marvin Minsky founder of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab coined the term “Telepresence”. He published an article in OMNI magazine titled “Telepresence”, and in that article, he described it as “the sensation of being there,” — really by means of a communication medium.

I feel like Sheridan (1992) does the best job of differentiating between presence and telepresence — He considers “presence” as the natural perception of an environment, and “telepresence” as a mediated perception of an environment. So “presence” is the generic perception of being present in a computer-simulated, artificial environment where you’re not physically present. And “telepresence” when it specifically involves operating or manipulating virtual objects or acting on the environment in some way.

Honestly, I wouldn’t worry too much about the differences between the two terms because the International Society for Presence Research released a comprehensive explication of the concept of presence and it states:

Presence (a shortened version of the term “telepresence”) is a psychological state or subjective perception in which even though part or all of an individual’s current experience is generated by and or filtered through human-made technology, part or all of the individual’s perception fails to accurately acknowledge the role of the technology in the experience.

Even though it’s somewhat interesting to be able to distinguish between these two terms, conceptually, or at least their origins — in practice, I’d go as far to say that this distinction doesn’t matter all that much, especially when it comes to instructional design —because if you’re designing for behavior change using virtual reality, that will almost always involve the learner acting on the virtual environment, either through manipulating objects or talking to virtual humans. It’s about promoting realism and prompting the feeling of having been somewhere, in that spatial scenery, with those objects, or with those virtual humans, and practicing and reinforcing those behaviors that we’re trying to develop automaticity for.

Creating a sense of presence is critical for any virtual reality learning experience. And interestingly enough, the greater sense of immersion your VR experience can provide the greater potential it has for inducing a sense of presence.

If you want to learn more about immersion, you’ll want to check out my video fully explaining everything you need to know about immersion in virtual reality.

I hope this was helpful for you. If you want to learn more about other terms you might hear in the XR space comment them below. Please be sure to like and subscribe. I’m going to be doing more of these videos in hopes to make VR/XR research accessible and digestible for everyone, so stay tuned, and thanks for watching!