Immersion, Presence, and Performance in Virtual Environments:
An Experiment using Tri-Dimensional Chess
Mel Slater, Vasilis
Linakis, Martin Usoh,
Rob Kooper
Abstract
This paper describes an experiment to assess the influence of immersion
on performance in immersive virtual environments. The task involved Tri-Dimensional
Chess, and required subjects to reproduce on a real chess board the state
of board learned from a sequence of moves witnessed in a virtual environment.
Twenty four subjects were allocated to a factorial design consisting of
two levels of immersion (exocentric screen based, and egocentric HMD based),
and two kinds of environment (plain and realistic. The results suggest that
egocentric subjects performed better than exocentric, and those in the more
realistic environment performed better than those in the less realistic
environment. Previous knowledge of chess, and amount of virtual practice
were also significant, and may be considered as control variables to equalise
these factors amongst the subjects. Other things being equal, males remembered
the moves better than females, although female performance improved with
higher spatial ability test score. The paper also attempts to clarify the
relationship between immersion, presence and performance, and locates the
experiment within such a theoretical framework.
Keywords
Virtual reality, virtual environments, immersion, presence, task performance,
human factors,
Tri-Dimensional Chess.
Contents
- Introduction: Is VR better than a workstation?
- Immersion, Presence and Task Performance
- Experiment
- Results
- Conclusions
- Acknowledgements
- References
Contact
email: m.slater@cs.ucl.ac.uk