From: overmyer@gmuvax2.gmu.edu (Scott Overmyer)
Subject: Re: 2nd Trial VR Definition
Date: Mon, 21 Oct 1991 16:28:10 GMT
Organization: George Mason University, Fairfax, Va.


In article <1991Oct18.001939.21408@milton.u.washington.edu> HVANCOTT@NAS (Harold Van Cott) writes:
>
>
>Virtual Reality technology strives to achieve a
>degree of naturalness in the interactions across the
>human-VR interface.  A virtual world is perceived as a
>place, not a picture.  It is experienced.  The user is
>immersed in the artificial environment, interacting
>with it as a participant observer.

       -- stuff deleted --
>
>The experience of virtual reality will have one or
>more of the following properties:
>
>- Multi-modal
>- Compellingness
>- Immersion
>- Symbolic/abstraction
>- Synthetic
>- Time-space benchmarking
>- Presence through touching and hearing
>- Unencumbered user
>- Design, simulation and manipulation
>- Immersive simulation
>
In keeping with your point about a virtual world being a place, not a
picture,  it seems to me that there should be some way in which to
evaluate the degree to which this feeling is true with respect to any VR
system.

I suggest you combine the attributes of "compellingness", "immersion",
"presence through touching and hearing", and "immersive simulation" into
one multi-attributed global value, let's call it just "presence" or
"sence of presence".  Define it as the degree to which a user feels
that their primary point of "reality reference" has shifted from the
real world to the virtual world.  Start the continuum at a minimal value
of "this is not worth the channel capacity of my little finger" to "this
(the virtual environment) is the real world".  Develop a metric which
allows evaluators to assign a value to each system with respect to this
continuum, and I think you will have a reasonable start at evaluating
whether a system is "virtual reality" or not.  Along these lines,
I would like to know what people are using (if anything) for "presence"
metrics.  In other words, by what quantitative means are researchers
measuring the extent to which participants in VR experiments/demos are
experiencing a sense of presence?  I can imagine a couple of ways to
measure this other than by just asking subjects' opinions.

I bring this up because, I am interested in exploring the
possibility of developing a rapid prototyping environment for virtual
worlds (domain specific of course) in order to test perceptual,
cognitive and emotional presence, while varying those visual and auditory
and tactile stimuli which which are known to contribute to this phenomenon.

scotto...

***********************************************************************
Scott P. Overmyer      "I don't know my employer's opinion."
Department of Systems Engineering
George Mason University                      Phone: 703.993.1703
Fairfax, Virginia 22030-4444 USA             Fax:   703.993.1706
email: overmyer@gmuvax2.gmu.edu
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