Are You There? A Study on Measuring Presence in Immersive Virtual Reality

With the recent development of virtual reality (VR) technologies, we can create a virtual environment that exceeds the constraints of the real environment. A concept called “presence” is one of the most important elements of a VR experience. To provide more interesting VR experiences, we need to measure how much the users feel their presence in the VR experiences is important. However, when we measure this presence by a questionnaire inside or outside the VR, the subjects’ sense of presence in virtual reality environments is disrupted by the transition from the VR experience to the questionnaire. Therefore, in this study, we propose a method to integrate questionnaires into VR experiences. We conduct two comparative experiments between the proposed method and the existing method to validate the effectiveness of our proposed method. From the results of the two experiments, although we cannot determine the optimal design for the proposed method and cannot say our proposed method can measure presence more accurately, we confirmed the partial effectiveness of the proposed method.