Enhancing the Sense of Presence in Virtual Reality

The vision of virtual reality, since Ivan Sutherland’s first head mounted device in 1968, has been the re-creation of reality, something indistinguishable from reality, akin to what was depicted in the 1999 film, The Matrix. However, researchers and developers have largely favored visual perception over other senses, leading to the design of virtual worlds that perhaps look real but do not feel real. This favoring of the visual sense and more recently visual and audio senses, overlooks theory in psychology and phenomenology that places embodied action at the center of perception. That is to say, it is the virtual environment’s ability to support and enable user actions that impacts perception and perhaps by extension, the user’s sense of presence, not just the visual fidelity. Starting with Gibson’s approach to action-based perception, we proposed a 4-D framework for creating virtual reality experiences that seamlessly blend extrinsic elements such as the user’s real world context with intrinsic elements such as the hardware specifications, application, and interactive content, with the goal to enable a higher sense of presence.