Defining "presence"

[crim3]

With all these different opinions and misconceptions about what "presence" is, in the technical sense within the VR "science" scope, may it be possible for Oculus to issue a blog post addressing the subject? with a non ambigous definition, some historical context ('cos AFAIK it's not a new concept) and examples of what is NOT "presence".

[DaftnDirect]

Presence and involvement are very closely linked, in real life and in the virtual.

I've been in meetings so boring my mind has wondered off to much more interesting places but it doesn't take much to come back to reality because you know it's reality.

The opposite is true for the virtual. No matter how good the kit is or how good it'll be in the future, you know it's virtual, so you have to be constantly distracted into believing it's real and that involves a lot of factors, such as
how good the equipment is
how involving the program is
what your previouse experiences have been including how new you are to VR
your imagination

And presence isn't limited to VR games, you wouldn't feel adrenaline playing Doom 3 on a monitor in the dark if you were just involved... you must also feel that you're there to some extent. Nor would you swear at other drivers playing Assetto Corsa on a monitor (& I've sworn a bit).

VR helps achieve presence in a big way but it's not the be all & end all.

[brantlew]

I've put dozens of newbies through the OC1 demo reel (the one with the dinos, paperland, and skyscraper). The skyscraper scene usually invokes some type of reaction. Some people sort of recoil with vertigo, but plenty of people giggled and then step forward into the void as a novelty, consciously breaking presence - or so they thought. But here's the thing. The older versions had you on this sort of long "plank" protruding from a ledge with railings. One thing I've never seen anyone do - even the people that walked around in the sky was to disobey the architecture of that ledge. Every single time, they would walk back along the plank carefully avoiding the railing to get back onto the ledge. That to me is presence.

[Anonymous]

Presence to me is when your mind subconsciously reacts to what it observes. When I watch a scary movie on TV, I start to "feel" scared, but never do I react as if my life is in danger. If, for example, VR became so real that I felt complete presence, a horror game might make me react as if I was in danger; throwing the headset off!

But those are reactions to negative things. What happens when I experience the positive things over and over?

Well, after reading what DaftnDirect said, It's very true. No matter how real VR becomes, our minds will always become distracted with our own imagination; we will become numb. So, you're involved in some life-like VR game, where you are assigned a mission and you must pay attention, but then you keep daydreaming about other things in real life that are more important to you... maybe that girl you met at the bar last night. Sure, at this time VR is 95% presence, but being involved in VR games over and over become predictable, unlike natural reality. So, could presence be subjective to the user? Absolutely!

Presence will make you believe you are there but with an escape as soon as you are uncomfortable. If 100% presence could be achieved (not just through visual and audio, but the other 3 senses) then the big time drug lords would be in danger. I mean, how nice would it be to experience a nirvana like drug, with pure belief, but without any actual affects to your mood, or body, and the trigger of "I'm done, turn off this drug"? But there is a long way to go to achieve 100% presence. As for now, presence will be a simple term, that will only be associated with VR.

[Anonymous]

Trying to explain the feeling of presence to anyone who hasn't been in VR is difficult.

The easy words of "It's the feeling of forgetting yourself and your actual surroundings and being present in the reality that is presented to you" just doesn't cut it.

I know I know I always bring up Elite Dangerous... but it's just such a perfect example of Presence. Don't get me wrong even with a Hotas X52 set up to reflect the exact locations of the flights stick and throttle in virtual space... even then your sense of presence is broken when you don't see your hands move in the way they actually are.

But forgetting the areas where the sense of presence is broken... in Elite Dangerous when you really are looking around at your cockpit and you look up through the canopy glass and actually see the tiny scratches on the glass where it has been polished... this level of detail and of depth creates presence in a way that is quite frankly profound...

I will never forget the first few nights I got ED to work perfect on my old DK2... they were some magical moments...

But like many people who are experienced will tell you that after a while you get used to the immersion and although the sense of presence is not lessened... the shock and awe of it all does.

The difference between playing a game on a monitor is you perhaps will remember playing it.... but with VR and a sense of presence it's forming actual memories of being in that place.

It's so hard to capture it in just words.

[crim3]

"RorschachPhoenix" wrote:
https://smartech.gatech.edu/bitstream/handle/1853/3584/94-06.pdf

PRESENCE AS THE DEFINING FACTOR IN A VR APPLICATION
Virtual Reality Graded Exposure in the Treatment of Acrophobia

It is a bit ... well ... older. 😉

An interesting reading. It looks like the concept is more open than I thought, or at least it was in 1994. Maybe since then it has evolved from a set of intuitive conjetures to a more neurological based concept, as the mentions to the "lizard brain" by Abrash suggest.

[crim3]

"brantlew" wrote:
It's a catch-phrase now and is commonly used to mean something like "deep engagement". But it's not that. It's not even an extrapolation of immersion which everyone seems to assume. At this point, I've seen so much VR that I remain almost permanently mentally detached from it - to the point of boredom. I don't feel much involvement in something like ToyBox anymore, but that doesn't mean my body doesn't respond with presence. Even in a disinterested state and fully aware of the technical realities of the presentation, I will catch myself doing things like involuntarily avoiding or anticipating collisions with objects.

That's something I use to warn about a couple of years ago in a spanish forum. No matter how awesome VR is now, it will become transparent and then only content will matter. But people in general is a bit reluctant to the idea of no longer being wowed by experiencing VR.
The same happens with other technologies like TV for example. TV it's such an amazing technology, almost magical, but we are exposed to it since our very first days of existance, so we only care about the content, wether it is entertaining or not.

[ThreeDeeVision]

Presence and immersion go hand in hand. These are just words to express the feeling of being 'in the game' and there is no reason to over-complicate their definitions. Presence is the feeling of being there and immersion is being so into the game you don't really think about anything else.

Even at this early stage of VR I get glimpses of both presence and immersion, but it only happens in situations where the input matches the game and the game is running good enough to provide stable head tracking. Any loss in positional tracking instantly breaks immersion and presence and any time the game input doesn't match what is happening in the game it instantly breaks immersion and presence.

Gamepad VR experiences only provide basic presence and immersion in a VR world, and only when the gamepad is represented in the VR world. Gamepads are a huge limitation in VR and the lack of truly immersive VR experiences is a direct result of a lack of proper inputs for developers to program against. Every person that tries VR for the first time looks for their hands, and proper representation of hands will be a huge leap in both presence and immersion. 3rd person gamepad VR experiences can be very fun, but will never give you the feeling of being there. You are just watching over a character that is there, it isn't you in there.

Right now the best VR experiences have inputs that match the game. Elite Dangerous, Euro Truck Sim 2, Dirt Rally, Live for Speed, and Flight Sim X with Flyinside FSX are all great examples of games where the inputs match the game good enough to get feelings of presence and immersion.

[Anonymous]

You bunch of crazy fools :shock:

Presence is what you get from Father Christmas next month...but only if you're not on his Naughty List 😄

[crim3]

"snowdog" wrote:
You bunch of crazy fools :shock:

Presence is what you get from Father Christmas next month...but only if you're not on his Naughty List 😄

:lol:

[crim3]

What I understand about the subject, based on Mr. Abrash talks:
One of the functions of our lizard brain (paleoncephal?) is to create a feeling of being awake and localized in whatever perceived place our perceptual system is getting together with the data gathered by our senses, mainly the eyes.

So, the idea is that if you fill a high enough portion of the field of view (80 degrees or more) with imagery with low enough artifacts due to discretization (high enough Hz, low persistence pixels, global update display), and the geometry of the synthetic scene match perfectly enough the point of view of the user (low latency, 6 dof sub-milimiter tracking ), then the lizard brain will be fooled and the sense of presence in the physical world will be substitute by a sense of presence on the computer generated world.

Implications are (still guessing) that as long as the scene is coherent enough, first, that the sense of presence is more a binary thing, and second, that is not dependant neither on the content, correctness of physic laws (including impenetrability of solid objects), being able to see your virtual body, or being able to use hands.

Because is not about the person being fooled into believing something (that would be the immersion part), but just fooling a little fully automatic (subconscience) part in the inners of our brains, creating that magical sensation of being fully aware that the synthetic world you are immersed in is not real but, at the same time, feeling it as a physical place.

I'd love to see a little article on the Oculus blog addressing this topic so we don't need to keep guessing things.