Revisiting the pit room:the effect of the plausibility illusion in stressful virtual reality experiences

Abstract. The feeling of presence is an important factor to consider when developing virtual experiences. Understanding the aspects that contribute to presence can give us better ideas on how to design and implement virtual reality (VR) applications. Previous studies have shown that presence involves a person’s sense of being in a virtual environment (VE), and how genuine the events taking place there feel, often referred to as place illusion (PI) and plausibility illusion (PSI) respectively. According to previous studies, we need both PI and PSI to elicit realistic responses. This thesis is a pilot study that explores the impact of PSI on people’s realistic responses in a stressful VE by introducing an unrealistic event that breaks PSI while still maintaining PI. To achieve this, a pit-room experiment was implemented and the users’ physiological changes, specifically heart rate, were analyzed while performing an interaction task under two conditions: one with the unrealistic event (non-scary) and one without (scary). In both conditions, the participants were tasked to drop bottles down the pit, however, in the non-scary condition, the bottles would float in the air rather than drop to the bottom. A within-subjects study was conducted on 20 participants with 2 sessions each. Participants’ responses were recorded using electrocardiogram (ECG) devices and questionnaires. Although the findings didn’t produce significant differences between the two conditions, the physiological data presented a trend according to which the unrealistic event in the non-scary condition appeared to calm participants slightly. These results give further insights into the effects of PSI in a VE and provide a basis for conducting further confirmatory studies on this topic

Serious Game Evaluation as a Meta-game

Purpose – This paper aims to briefly outline the seamless evaluation approach and its application during an evaluation of ORIENT, a serious game aimed at young adults. Design/methodology/approach – In this paper, the authors detail a unobtrusive, embedded evaluation approach that occurs within the game context, adding value and entertainment to the player experience whilst accumulating useful data for the development team. Findings – The key result from this study was that during the “seamless evaluation” approach, users were unaware that they had been participating in an evaluation, with instruments enhancing rather than detracting from the in-role game experience. Practical implications – This approach, seamless evaluation, was devised in response to player expectations, perspectives and requirements, recognising that in the evaluation of games the whole process of interaction including its evaluation must be enjoyable and fun for the user. Originality/value – Through using seamless evaluation, the authors created an evaluation completely embedded within the “magic circle” of an in-game experience that added value to the user experience whilst also yielding relevant results for the development team

A separate reality : An update on place Illusion and plausibility in virtual reality

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 illusions. Presence (PI and Psi) together with the illusion of ownership over the virtual body that self-represents the participant, are the three key illusions 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.Postprint (published version

A novel integrating virtual reality approach for the assessment of the attachment behavioral system

[EN] Virtual reality (VR) technology represent a novel and powerful tool for behavioural research in psychological assessment. Virtual reality provides simulated experiences able to create the sensation of undergoing real situations. Users become active participants in the virtual environment seeing, hearing, feeling, and actuating as if they were in the real world. Currently, the most psychological VR applications concern the treatment of various mental disorders but not the assessment, that it is mainly based on paper and pencil tests. The observation of behaviors is costly, labor-intensive, and it is hard to create social situations in laboratory settings, even if the observation of actual behaviors could be particularly informative. In this framework, social stressful experiences can activate various behaviours of attachment for a significant person that can help to control and soothe them to promote individual s well-being. Social support seeking, physical proximity, and positive and negative behaviors represent the main attachment behaviors that people can carry out during experiences of distress. We proposed virtual reality as a novel integrating approach to measure real attachment behaviours. The first studies on attachment behavioural system by VR showed the potentiality of this approach. To improve the assessment during the VR experience, we proposed virtual stealth assessment (VSA) as a new method. VSA could represents a valid and novel technique to measure various psychological attributes in real-time during the virtual experience. 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Restoration in a Virtual Reality Forest Environment

The focus in this research was on the effects of restorative experiences in an immersive virtual reality (VR) forest environment. For 5 min one hundred participants used a VR application depicting a forest via a head-mounted display and headphones. The extent of the restorative effect on the participants was measured in terms of perceived restorative outcomes, vitality, and mood before and after using the VR application. After finding out that using the VR application improved the perceived restoration outcomes, vitality and mood of the participants, the perceived restoration of the VR environment was compared with experiences in physical forests. According to the results, the VR environment was generally perceived as restorative as the physical forest environments, and more fascinating and coherent. The results imply that VR technology could have an effective restorative function during a school or work day when there is no access to highly restorative natural environments. Knowledge about the restorative qualities of physical and virtual natural environments could be applied to develop both the virtual and physical environments that are currently available and where people have access to.Peer reviewe

Auditory-visual virtual reality as a diagnostic and therapeutic tool for cynophobia

International audienceTraditionally, virtual reality exposure-based treatment concentrates primarily on the presentation of a high fidelity visual experience. However, adequately combining the visual and the auditory experience provides a powerful tool to enhance sensory processing and modulate attention. We present the design and usability testing of an auditory-visual interactive environment for investigating virtual reality exposurebased treatment for cynophobia. The specificity of our application is that it involves 3D sound, allowing the presentations and spatial manipulation of a fearful stimulus in the auditory modality, in the visual modality, and both. We conducted an evaluation test with 10 dog fearful participants in order to assess the capacity of our auditory-visual virtual environment to generate fear reactions. The specific perceptual characteristics of the dog model that were implemented in the virtual environment were highly arousing, suggesting that virtual reality is a promising tool to treat cynophobia

Cognitive and Affective Mechanisms of Immersive Virtual Reality Learning Environments

Students and educators value the potential use of immersive virtual reality (IVR) in the classroom to teach academic content as it may increase interest and motivation to learn, which in turn may increase learning outcomes. However, one criticism is that features of IVR, such as extraneous sounds, animations, and interactions, that are not relevant to the content of the lesson, as well as the affective arousal associated with the use of IVR, may be distracting to learning processes. To examine this distraction hypothesis, two experiments were conducted in which students viewed a biology (Experiment 1) or history (Experiment 2) lesson either in IVR or in a desktop lesson containing the same content, with or without practice questions. In both experiments, students who viewed the lesson on the desktop in a PowerPoint (Experiment 1) or an interactive video (Experiment 2) outperformed those who viewed the IVR lessons on transfer tests. The desktop lessons led to higher cognitive engagement based on EEG measures in both experiments, and less self-reported extraneous cognitive load in Experiment 1. Participants also reported more high-arousal positive emotions after the IVR lessons in both experiments, and experienced higher physiological arousal based on heart-rate measures after the IVR lessons compared to the desktop lessons in Experiment 2. The same pattern of results was found when adjunct practice questions were or were not included in the lessons. Across both experiments, mediation analyses suggest that the negative relationship between instructional media and learning outcomes can be explained by self-reported cognitive processing or emotional arousal, particularly for retention test performance. Overall, immersive environments may create high emotional arousal and cognitive distraction during learning, which leads to poorer learning outcomes than desktop environments

The Impact of Resilience and Grit on Inductive and Deductive Reasoning Following Exposure to Combat-Like Environments

Cognitive processes have been shown to be severely affected by exposure to combat and war. While the negative impact of war on cognitive performance is apparent through numerous soldier narratives, the scientific investigation of this phenomenon is limited. Furthermore, the moderating influence of an individual’s resilience and grit on cognitive functions following combat environments is unknown. Understanding this interaction is essential in further understanding individual cognitive performance. Because the psychological wounds inflicted by combat situations affect individuals’ mental health, studying how such environments influence cognitive processes and performance can improve the training of our soldiers. This dissertation focuses on assessing how combat-like environments influence an individual’s ability to effectively and efficiently reason, and further examines whether an individual’s grit and resilience affect deductive and inductive reasoning in stressful environments. Participants were recruited from a private US military academy. The study used a pretest-posttest mixed design to investigate possible cognitive decrements in individuals’ ability to reason following exposure to war-like environments simulated by immersive and non-immersive technologies. Dependent measures included both inductive and deductive reasoning (as measured by The Letter Sets Test and Overton’s (1990) version of the Wason Selection Task, respectively) by placing participants into the immersive or non-immersive conditions. Self-reported resilience and grit were tested for interaction effects to examine how an individual’s resilience and grit influences an individual’s ability to reason in war-like environments. These findings might give a richer understanding of the ways in which cognitive mechanisms are affected by stressful environments like combat

Therapeutic Benefits of Nature Images on Health

This thesis is a journey that travels back in time, when nature and health were inseparable, and forward to a time when science was the impetus for separation between the natural landscape and healing (chapter two), then into the present when nature and health are being reunited, only through science (chapter three). The research conducted in 2008-2009 is reported in the form of three journal articles. The first article (chapter four) developed a methodology using sequential methods to select the nature images that would be used in the experiment. Appleton\u27s prospect refuge theory was the basis for four image categories. The second article (chapter five) reports on the experimental procedures using multiple methods of psychological and physiological data collection to assess the therapeutic influence of the image on a person in pain. The third article (chapter six) reports on findings related to `presence\u27, a virtual environments concept that reports on a sense of \u27being in\u27 the mediated environment and `influence\u27, which measured how much the image influenced thoughts during three stages: rest, pain treatment, and recovery. This exploratory study was designed in an interdisciplinary format, using various theory, methodology, and concepts from a broad array of disciplines to investigate which nature images are more therapeutic than others. Only statistically significant results are reported

A Presence- and Performance-Driven Framework to Investigate Interactive Networked Music Learning Scenarios

Cooperative music making in networked environments has been subject of extensive research, scientific and artistic. Networked music performance (NMP) is attracting renewed interest thanks to the growing availability of effective technology and tools for computer-based communications, especially in the area of distance and blended learning applications. We propose a conceptual framework for NMP research and design in the context of classical chamber music practice and learning: presence-related constructs and objective quality metrics are used to problematize and systematize the many factors affecting the experience of studying and practicing music in a networked environment. To this end, a preliminary NMP experiment on the effect of latency on chamber music duos experience and quality of the performance is introduced. The degree of involvement, perceived coherence, and immersion of the NMP environment are here combined with measures on the networked performance, including tempo trends and misalignments from the shared score. Early results on the impact of temporal factors on NMP musical interaction are outlined, and their methodological implications for the design of pedagogical applications are discussed