1 Delivering Environmental Presence through Procedural Virtual Environments

While designing and evaluating virtual reality applica-tions, the user’s sense of presence plays a crucial role. Al-though the exact definition of presence is elusive its neces-sary conditions will include the presentation of sensory cues that are consistent with the internal models that humans have acquired of the world in which they exist. This paper deals with one of the many theories for presence that have been proposed, the notion of environmental presence. This theory states that presence depends on the effectiveness of the cou-pling of perceptions and action between the user and the (vir-tual) environment, which directly refers to the ecological view of perceptual veridicality. We believe that environ-mental presence is based on the consistency and coherence between the properties of the virtual world and those the user expects. In order to investigate this notion we propose a dy-namic application that is capable of producing an unlimited number of authentic, procedural, virtual environments. Be-cause of their dynamics such environments can produce a great number of possible and evolving reciprocal interac-tions. We propose an experiment to investigate how these interactions might increase a users feeling that the virtual environment seems real and thus try to understand how pro-cedural virtual environments can contribute to the delivery of presence in virtual reality. We will in particular use this ap-proach in the context of mixed reality interactions for social presence. Keywords--- procedural virtual environment, pres-ence, environmental presence. 1