Sense-of-presence in virtual and real environments showing similar content : questionnaire development and relationships among sense-of-presence, performance, and cybersickness

Sense-of-presence (SOP) is an important aspect in our perception of a physical environment and has been adopted as a standard measure of the quality of a virtual environment alongside with performance and cybersickness. The contribution of this thesis is two-fold: (i) it studies the presentation method of the current Presence Questionnaire (PQ, Singer and Witmer, 1996) with an aim to increase its ability to detect the significant differences among the rated SOP from participants expose to real and virtual environments showing similar audio and visual content; and (ii) it reports, for the first time, the relationships among SOP, performance, and cybersickness from participants exposed to virtual, telematic, and real environments of different field-of-views, image delays, use of stereo vision, use of 3D spatial audio, and image resolutions. Three experiments involving 216 participants were conducted. Results of the first experiment show that when using the PQ, participants were reluctant to select extreme positions (i.e. 1- or 7- rating) in a Likert scale even though these extreme ratings were the appropriate answers. In the second experiment, the PQ was presented according to techniques adopted from Cooper and Harper (1969) and the percentages of participants who had inappropriately avoided selecting extreme values ratings values reduced significantly (p<0.05). In the third experiment, the PQ presented using the Cooper-Harper technique was used to study the relationships among SOP, performance, levels of cybersickness and excitement of participants exposed to a series of virtual, telematic and real environments showing similar content but with different combinations of field-of-views, image delays, use of stereo vision, use of 3D audio, and image resolutions. Gender effect was found in SOP, cybersickness and excitement (p<0.05) and no significant correlation between task performance and SOP was found. There was significantly positive correlation between SOP and excitement (p<0.05). Negative significant correlation between SOP and sickness was also found (p