Re - Creating the Botanics: Towards a Sense of Place in Virtual Environments

Abstract

The EC funded project BENOGO seeks to re-create real places using photo-realisticimmersive virtual reality technology and in so doing investigates the nature ofpresence and sense of place in such environments. We discuss the first stages in ourwork investigating how far a sense of place can be created in a virtual environmentand benchmarked against the real world. This paper reports early studies whichinvestigated sense of place in a real-world location – a glasshouse in a botanicalgarden – and the first in a series of planned experiments with its virtual equivalent.The results provide preliminary indications of which elements of sense of placemanage to penetrate the considerable constraints of the current virtual environmentand how the virtual experience might be redesigned in future. We also discusstechniques for investigating sense of place in this context and briefly describe the nextsteps in the work.