The Phi Angle: A Theoretical Essay on Sense of Presence, Human Factors, and Performance in Virtual Reality

Abstract

The question of the relationship between the sense of presence and performance in virtual reality is fundamental for anyone wishing to use the tool methodologically. Indeed, if the sense of presence can modify performance per se, then individual factors affecting the human-computer interaction might have repercussions on performance, despite being unrelated to it. After a discussion on the sense of presence and the particularities it provokes, this work studies the psychophysiology of virtual reality. This in virtuo experience is understood according to a constitutive and reciprocal relationship with the subject's cognitive profile, made up of all the human, contextual and motivational factors impacting the processing of immersion. The role and importance of performance in virtual reality is described in this framework in such a way as to be studied methodologically. The presence-performance relationship is discussed based on previous works and analyzed in terms of attentional resources. Finally, the degree of ecological validity of the performance is described as the factor modulating the relationship between the sense of presence and performance (the Phi Angle). Limitations, applications and test hypotheses of the model are presented. This work aims to help the conceptualization of virtual reality, but also to improve its methodological framework.

Predicting VR cybersickness and its impact on visuomotor performance using head rotations and field (in)dependence

“…On the contrary, FDI was measured before immersion, and explained more than ¼ of the variance of cybersickness. This suggests that the Virtual Rod and Frame Test assesses a cognitivoperceptive profile more or less adapted to exposure to VR (Maneuvrier et al, 2021;Maneuvrier and Westermann, 2022). This result highlights the possibility of using FDI as a predictor of cybersickness in VR: it seems that the more field dependent an individual is, the more likely he or she is of experiencing negative symptoms in VR.…”

“…This appears to be in line with previous findings and theories (Weech et al, 2019;Maneuvrier et al, 2020), and seems rather logical. Indeed, when we consider the economy of attentional resources in VR (Draper and Blair, 1996;Draper et al, 1998), we can consider that individuals experiencing negative symptoms have to i) allocate attentional resources to symptom inhibition and/or regulation, ii) have their attentional resources directly altered by symptom salience and iii) have their attentional resources focus diverted from the virtual environment to the participant's body (Maneuvrier and Westermann, 2022). All this reduces, both quantitatively and qualitatively, the amount of attentional resources available for the emergence and maintenance of a stable sense of presence and flow.…”

“…Still, it is surprising to see that the video game experience was not associated with any other variable, not even the sense of presence nor the cybersickness, despite being regularly considered as an important human factor of VR (Lachlan & Krcmar, 2011;Weech et al, 2020b). Indeed, video game experience is often associated with a VR favorable experience because of i) a sensory mismatch habituation (Howarth and Hodder, 2008) and ii) common affordances and cognitive schemes (Gibson, 1966;Flach and Holden, 1998;Maneuvrier and Westermann, 2022). One could defend that the one-item question measuring video game experience was too little informative to differentiate the very different types of video games, for example, between casual puzzle games on smartphone and first person intensive shooters games (Bosser and Nakatsu, 2006;Baniqued et al, 2013;Kapalo et al, 2015).…”

“…Thus, absence of vection and/or and head rotations may explain why cybersickness symptoms were not, in Pratviel et al (2021), associated with visuomotor performance. On the contrary, during a task requiring large visual explorations of a spatial virtual Frontiers in Virtual Reality frontiersin.org environment (and thus triggering kinetogenic situations), we might expect a negative relationship between cybersickness and visuomotor performance, whether through visual fatigue (LaViola, 2000;Bos et al, 2008;Rebenitsch and Owen, 2016), cognitive fatigue and disorientation (Gresty et al, 2008;Gresty and Golding, 2009;Maneuvrier et al, 2020) detour of attentional resources to physiological symptoms, or allocation of these same attentional resources to the resolution/compensation of the psychophysiological state (Maneuvrier and Westermann, 2022).…”

The Quest of Spatial Presence by Puzzle-Solving Games in VR

“…However, these interactions were not evaluated from a spatial cognitional framework. As a result of the literature research, it has been marked that VR game performance depends on spatial performance in some cases (Maneuvrier & Westermann, 2020;Maneuvrier et al, 2022). If this is the case, individuals with higher spatial ability should finish the tasks more quickly than those with lower spatial scores.…”