Motion as a Determinant of Presence in Immersive Virtual Reality.

Presence, defined as the “sense of being there”, is suggested to be the main facilitator of success in immersive virtual reality (IVR) interventions. While system factors (e.g., refresh rate, resolution, degrees of freedom) have been at the forefront of IVR and presence research, less attention is paid to how individual behaviors in an IVR experience may affect the degree of presence achievable. These differences in behavior may influence users’ experience, independent of the IVR hardware or software. With that, this study investigated if a user’s motion in an IVR experience, specifically user-initiated motion (UIM), could predict their self-reported presence scores. Eighty younger adults (22 male, 57 female, 1 non-binary) completed a 10-min IVR experience in Vesper Peak on the HTC Vive where they were asked to explore the environment. Motion data were collected via the pyopenvr package in which telemetry data of the headset were recorded. UIM was then calculated by first calculating the distance between two of these data points and then averaging the distance across each pair of points for the entire dataset. Presence was collected via the IGroup Presence Questionnaire (Cronbach’s α = 0.87). 5 participants’ data were removed due to corruption. A regression model was used to analyze UIM and presence scores. The overall model was significant (R2 = 0.147, RSE = 5.561, F(1,73) = 12.61, p < 0.001), demonstrating that UIM could significantly predict presence. These results suggest that a user’s behavior may influence feelings of presence.