Spatial Presence in Real and Remote Immersive Environments and the Effect of Multisensory Stimulation

Abstract

This article presents a user experiment that assesses the feeling of spatial presence, defined as the sense of “being there” in both a real and a remote environment (respectively the so-called “natural presence” and “telepresence”). Twenty-eight participants performed a 3D-pointing task while being either physically located in a real office or remotely transported by a teleoperation system. The evaluation also included the effect of combining audio and visual rendering. Spatial presence and its components were evaluated using the ITC-SOPI questionnaire (Lessiter, Freeman, Keogh, & Davidoff, 2001 ). In addition, objective metrics based on user performance and behavioral indicators were logged. Results indicate that participants experienced a higher sense of spatial presence in the remote environment (hyper-presence), and a higher ecological validity. In contrast, objective metrics prove higher in the real environment, which highlights the absence of correlation between spatial presence and the objective metrics used in the experiment. Moreover, results show the benefit of adding audio rendering in both environments to increase the sense of spatial presence, the performance of participants, and their engagement during the task.

Spatial Presence, Performance, and Behavior between Real, Remote, and Virtual Immersive Environments

“…This result is in agreement with many studies that compared real and virtual environments [65]. However, it goes against the outcomes of one of previous findings where participants experienced a sense of hyper-presence in a remote condition compared to a real baseline [21]. This could be due to the dynamic nature of the navigation task in the present study that resulted in significant perception discrepancy between the real and the remote environments, with haptic stimuli experienced only in the real condition (whereas in the previous study, the perception of both environments was almost similar because participants relied on visual and audio stimuli only).…”

“…The results did not show any correlation between participants' sense of presence assessed by a 1-100% rating scale and performance. Khenak et al compared spatial presence between a real office and a remote representation of the same office rendered in an HMD [21]. The goal of the task was to point to the maximum number of images that were appearing.…”

“…The task design has been guided by several considerations derived from previous work [21], likely to heighten the sense of spatial presence, namely (a) the user moves in his/her environment and controls his/her movement, (b) he/she makes decisions based on information dynamically collected from the environment and (c) his/her actions are likely to cause irreversible/real consequences in the environment.…”

The Experience of Presence in the Mars Exploration Rover Mission

“…Among the greatest achievements of modern science is the exploration of Mars. Much of this has been done using rovers such as Spirit and Opportunity in the Mars Exploration Rover mission (MER;2004-2018 see Figure 1). Ethnographies of the teams exploring Mars have shown that a key to their success was that team members had a technologically mediated sense of presence on the Red Planet (Clancey, 2012;Vertesi, 2015).…”

“…Second, scientists do not directly control the rovers; engineers control them through batch programming, sending up commands once per sol. Thus, factors that normally establish virtual presence are unavailable to scientists working remotely on Mars (Carlson et al, 2017;Khenak, Vézien, Théry, & Bourdot, 2018;Sheridan, 1992).…”