A qualitative case study on deconstructing presence for young adults and older adults

Abstract In this paper, we present the results of an exploratory qualitative case study on presence experienced by groups of young adults and older adults during their use of an interactive virtual reality application mixing realistic and fantasy elements. In contrast to most previous studies, we do not focus on a set of predetermined factors but instead adopt an open-ended qualitative approach to identify emerging factors from the users’ experiences. We then analyze these factors against the place illusion/plausibility illusion (PI/PSI) framework of Skarbez, Neyret, et al. (2017) to investigate whether PI and PSI, as well as their contributing factors, can be separated. According to our findings, a user can experience PI and PSI independently from each other; however, they often appeared intermixed when investigated on the scope of the whole experience. Breaks in presence, as well as breaks in plausibility, could mostly, but not entirely, be attributed to immersion and coherence factors, respectively. An interesting finding is that both participant groups turned out to have two subgroups interpreting their experience with a particular frame of reference of differing expectations. These frames of reference affected not only PSI, as expected, but PI as well, suggesting that coherence could be a contributing factor to both PI and PSI. Our contribution adds to the relatively small body of research investigating the separation of PI and PSI. Our exploratory findings can be utilized as directions for designing future confirmatory studies