The Importance of Significant Information in Presence and Stress within a Virtual Reality Experience

In this paper, a pilot study on the relationship between significant information, presence and stress in virtual environments is presented. The experiment shown in this work was performed with a Medical Emergency Training Simulator based on virtual reality, and was conducted with two sets of subjects: critical care specialists and people without experience in medicine, trained to properly act with the concrete clinical problem being simulated. During the experiment, the Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) of the subjects was recorded, and presence and stress questionnaire were completed by the subjects. This study found that results from stress and presence measurements show an evident correlation, making apparent a close relationship between both variables. Our results also show the importance of significant information when a high degree of presence or stress is needed in a VR Training Simulator.