The impetus for this field comes from a number of directions. Firstly, as the amount of processing power available for rendering has increased, it has now become feasible to devote a little of it to aspects of a VE beyond visual realism. However visually appealing a VE is, if it is static and empty of change and behaviour, the immersive experience is of limited interest. Cities without people c...

Students in grades four through twelve from fourteen schools learned to build their own immersive virtual environments (VEs). This required them to decide on the theme of their VE, to determine what objects to place in it and what behaviors these objects would exhibit, to model their objects using CAD software, to specify the form and function of the VE for professional programmers to use as th...

The research literature on Web-based learning supports the assumption that interaction is important for a successful course, yet questions exist regarding the nature and extent of the interaction and its effects on student performance. Much of the research is based on student perceptions of the quality and quantity of their interactions and how much they have learned in an online course. The pu...

Presence is the experience of being somewhere arising from the interplay of technological, psychological and bodily factors. Experiences, generally – though there are exceptionsTPPT, are a consequence of interactions with things and events in the world. Thus to experience is to experience something. Ordinarily these somethings are objects and events in the world but in presence research these a...

The interactive installation “Drawing Spaces” investigates strategies for creating a bodily sense of presence and awareness in networked space created through intersection of shared physical and virtual spaces. This paper presents two „Drawing Spaces“ experiments: 1) a configuration where realtime generated virtual space mediates participants’ interaction in a shared physical space (exhibited a...

‘Presence’, the sense of being inside a virtual environment evoked with the help of computer mediation, has come to be a subject well explored in the field of virtual reality. Studies on mental imagery confirm that we can intuitively evoke objects and spaces in our minds and interact with them temporally. We believe that a sense of presence could be experienced in such self-evoked reality as we...

We describe a novel immersive environment – the Interactive Tent – and an artistic production within it – The Illusion of Being. In this production, immersants experience a vivid cycle of the seasons in a way that depends on their bodily movements. Everybody’s experience of The Illusion is unique, since by moving immersants slip from one version of the seasonal cycle to another. In all, there a...

In this paper, our ambition is to find a way of measuring “presence” to use it as a measure for ecological validity in driving simulators. The underlying assumption is that a person experiencing a strong sense of presence in the virtual environment will react in this environment as if it would be a real one. We propose to measure "presence" by measuring “attention” toward the driving task". Our...

Presence measurements are traditionally using a variety of subjective and objective measures. However, constraints often result in subjective measurements using questionnaires as a key method of data collection. In this paper we present a study of 44 participants of a collaborative augmented reality game known as TimeWarp which used both subjective and objective behavioral measures where both v...

The goal of Distributed Immersive Performance (DIP) is to allow musicians to collaborate synchronously over distance. Remote collaboration over the Internet poses many challenges such as delayed auditory and visual feedback to the musicians and a reduced sense of presence of the other musicians. We are systematically studying the effects of performing under remote conditions so as to guide the ...