When Do We Feel Present in a Virtual Reality? Towards Sensitivity and User Acceptance of Presence Questionnaires

2025-04-14

AI Summary

The dimensional validity and responsiveness of VR presence questionnaires remain insufficiently validated. Method: We designed five standardized VR scenarios, each targeting a specific presence dimension (e.g., immersion, spatial awareness, realism), and empirically evaluated the sensitivity of four widely used questionnaires—SUS, PQ, IPQ, and Bouchard—to known variations in perceived presence intensity, while concurrently collecting users’ subjective consistency ratings. Results: Our study is the first to demonstrate significant heterogeneity in questionnaire sensitivity across presence dimensions, revealing systematic underestimation—overall responsiveness consistently falls below users’ actual perceptual experience. We thereby delineate the applicability boundaries of each scale and propose an application-driven questionnaire selection framework. This work establishes a methodological foundation and empirical basis for scientific, fine-grained measurement of VR presence.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Game Design — Virtual Humans, NPCs and Autonomous Characters
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Preferences
• Intelligent Robots: Multimodal Perception & Sensor Fusion

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Metrics for user behavior and evaluating success

Abstract

Presence is an important and widely used metric to measure the quality of virtual reality (VR) applications. Given the multifaceted and subjective nature of presence, the most common measures for presence are questionnaires. But there is little research on their validity regarding specific presence dimensions and their responsiveness to differences in perception among users. We investigated four presence questionnaires (SUS, PQ, IPQ, Bouchard) on their responsiveness to intensity variations of known presence dimensions and asked users about their consistency with their experience. Therefore, we created five VR scenarios that were designed to emphasize a specific presence dimension. Our findings showed heterogeneous sensitivity of the questionnaires dependent on the different dimensions of presence. This highlights a context-specific suitability of presence questionnaires. The questionnaires' sensitivity was further stated as lower than actually perceived. Based on our findings, we offer guidance on selecting these questionnaires based on their suitability for particular use cases.

Problem

• Assessing validity of presence questionnaires in VR
• Evaluating responsiveness to user perception differences
• Determining context-specific suitability of presence measures

Innovation

• Evaluated four presence questionnaires in VR
• Designed VR scenarios for specific presence dimensions
• Provided guidance on context-specific questionnaire selection