The Why, What, and How of Immersive Experience

Abstract

Assessing and modelling the quality of immersive experience has become a trending topic in QoE. To achieve this purpose, we would firstly want to know why an immersive experience is important to us, what exactly is defined as an immersive experience, and how we could actually measure an immersive experience. This paper aims to answer these questions. We start from the rationales of designing immersive experience, and then briefly go through the definitions of immersion from the system and user perspectives. We also provide our own definition of immersion that fits into the QoE assessment and measurement paradigm. We continue to discuss the pros and cons of four popular measurements of immersion, namely, the psychometric questionnaires, the continuous subjective measures, the primary or secondary task performance, and the neuro-psycho-physiological methods. We also provide a global view of comparing and evaluating these measurements by profiling them along five quality dimensions. Finally, we postulate, briefly, four novel methods of measuring immersion, linking the definitions and theories of immersion with the measurements we have discussed in this paper. INDEX TERMS Immersion, extended reality, subjective tests, objective tests, psychometric questionnaire, continuous subjective measures, primary or secondary task performance, neuro-psycho-physiological methods.

Method for Subjective Assessment of Immersion in Audiovisual Experiences

“…Current methods for quantifying immersion can be classified as subjective tests (psychometric) or objective tests (behavioral and physiological measures). Zhang [6] provides a detailed discussion of the merits and demerits of these methods. A lack of established links between objective measures and immersion restricts us to subjective measures.…”

“…Since the goal in this study was to obtain information on the overall immersion in the experience with the least possible complexity, subjective measures were deemed to be more suitable for the task. Please refer to Zhang [6] and Agrawal et al [4] for a review on the existing experimental paradigms for evaluating immersion.…”

“…However they can be quite lengthy (greater than 25 questions) and administering them after each experience drastically increases the experimental time. Additionally questionnaires are based on a limited set of pre-defined questions and thus fail to capture any unexpected aspect of the immersive experience [6]. In their study on the experience of immersion in games, Jennett et al [3] compared the results obtained from a questionnaire developed to assess immersion to that of an individual question on immersion.…”

“…5 Thus the final model was limited to the block and treatment effects. 6 The variances for the treatment levels were checked using Levene's test and the trials were independent of each other by design.…”

“…It has been a central topic in virtual reality and video game studies but is applicable in various domains such as literature and film as well. The subject of immersion has been covered at length PAPERS QUANTIFYING IMMERSION IN AUDIOVISUAL EXPERIENCES in [3][4][5][6]. Therefore only the points critical for conducting experimental investigations are discussed in this work.…”