A Separate Reality: An Update on Place Illusion and Plausibility in Virtual Reality

TLDR

Presence in virtual reality is conceptualized as the combination of Place Illusion, Plausibility, and body ownership, with copresence emerging from interactions among participants or with virtual agents. This review updates the 2009 discussion by outlining unresolved questions and controversies, particularly regarding models of Plausibility. The authors survey a range of presence‑assessment techniques, from questionnaires and physiological/behavioural measures to psychophysical transitions and sentiment‑analysis‑based preference methods. They conclude that Plausibility is the most complex and compelling illusion, warranting further study, and that an optimal measurement approach combines psychophysical methods with qualitative sentiment analysis.

Abstract

We review the concept of presence in virtual reality, normally thought of as the sense of “being there” in the virtual world. We argued in a 2009 paper that presence consists of two orthogonal illusions that we refer to as Place Illusion (PI, the illusion of being in the place depicted by the VR) and Plausibility (Psi, the illusion that the virtual situations and events are really happening). Both are with the proviso that the participant in the virtual reality knows for sure that these are illnesses. Presence (PI and Psi) together with the illusion of ownership over the virtual body that self-represents the participant, are the three key illnesses of virtual reality. Copresence, togetherness with others in the virtual world, can be a consequence in the context of interaction between remotely located participants in the same shared virtual environments, or between participants and virtual humans. We then review several different methods of measuring presence: questionnaires, physiological and behavioural measures, breaks in presence, and a psychophysics method based on transitions between different system configurations. Presence is not the only way to assess the responses of people to virtual reality experiences, and we present methods that rely solely on participant preferences, including the use of sentiment analysis that allows participants to express their experience in their own words rather than be required to adopt the terminology and concepts of researchers. We discuss several open questions and controversies that exist in this field, providing an update to the 2009 paper, in particular with respect to models of Plausibility. We argue that Plausibility is the most interesting and complex illusion to understand and is worthy of significant more research. Regarding measurement we conclude that the ideal method would be a combination of a psychophysical method and qualitative methods including sentiment analysis.