- Email: [email protected]
Distance learning immersive environments: Sense of presence exploration
Journal of Visual Languages and Computing ] (]]]]) ]]]–]]]
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of Visual Languages and Computing journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jvlc
Distance learning immersive environments: Sense of presence exploration Max M. North Visualization & Simulation Research Center, Engineering Technology and Management, Southern Polytechnic State University, GA, USA
a r t i c l e i n f o
abstract
Article history: Received 22 September 2014 Accepted 24 September 2014
Distance learning technologies are becoming more important for the delivery of content as distance education seems rapidly growing adoption worldwide. These technologies allow collaboration between students and teachers in globally disparate environments. Immersive environments are one recent innovation with significant promise, offering a sense of presence—the sense of “being there”—which can strengthen and reinforce distance learning. The primary purpose of this study is to research the sense of presence using an immersive environment. While this is a work-in-progress, the authors provide preliminary results and conclusions. & 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Distance Learning-VR- Sense of Presence
1. Introduction There are different aspects that make immersive environments (also known as virtual reality) feel as real as possible. One well-known aspect of an immersive environment is “the sense of presence” in the environment. It is often thought of as the feeling in a subject of truly “being there.” In the 1990s, a few theoretical research articles were published in the Journal of Presence, Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the 2000s, researchers increasingly have been exploring this topic, using the knowledge gained from various immersive environments studies to further their applications. In-depth studies into the sense of presence are currently being investigated, but because of the complex nature of this subject, requiring interdisciplinary collaboration and a significant technological investment, they have been very focused and limited to specific studies. This study expands on some unanswered questions in the
E-mail address: [email protected]
literature: What is presence, exactly? Does presence go beyond the physical attributes and into the cognitive mind? What is an immersive environment, and how does a person's sense of presence change in that environment? What factors contribute to the sense of presence in an environment, whether virtual (immersive) or real? What are the best methods and devices used for measuring presence? 2. Sense of presence How is sense of presence defined? In this research paper, we define presence as the awareness or state of mind of being in an environment, whether real or virtual [1,2]. Experiencing a sense of presence can happen whenever a person mentally feels that he or she is present in a situation. For example, when reading a book, some people may feel what the characters are feeling and become wrapped up in the book—they may feel as though they are watching a movie, or have an even deeper connection with the text, “watching” events as they unfold. In 1980, Marvin Minsky coined the term “telepresence” [3]. Minsky described telepresence as “when the virtual
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jvlc.2014.09.006 1045-926X/& 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Please cite this article as: M.M. North, Distance learning immersive environments: Sense of presence exploration, Journal of Visual Languages and Computing (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jvlc.2014.09.006i
M.M. North / Journal of Visual Languages and Computing ] (]]]]) ]]]–]]]
Number of Parcipants
2
Immersive Visualizaon Environment 10 5 0
1
2
3
4 5 6 7 8 9 Quesonarie Rang (10)
10
Fig. 2. Rating of the sense of presence in the virtual world during the experiment in the immersive environment. Fig. 1. This figure depicts several subjects engaged in an Immersive Visualization Environment (Distance Learning).
experience dominates the real world experience. This describes the feeling of actually being in the environment generated by technology instead of being in an actual physical environment” [4]. Over time, the study of “telepresence” yielded to the general study of “presence,” since telepresence is more commonly used with teleoperations [3]. Through research, many articles and journals defined presence differently, but all had general meaning similar to the one elaborated here. 3. Immersive environment experiment 3.1. Participants Thirty-five volunteers participated in this part of the study.
world during the experiment.” A graph of the results for this question is shown in Fig. 2. 4. Preliminary results and conclusions A majority of participants experienced a strong sense of presence of the virtual world in the immersive environment: 86% of the participants—30 individuals—responded with a rating between 7 and 9, indicating that the participants felt a high sense presence in the immersive environment. Perhaps an interesting part of this study is found in the total sense of presence scores. While reason would indicate that a subject0 s total degree of immersion in concurrent environments should be 100% (or ten on the rating scale in this study), from a subjective point of view the total degree of immersion may be considerably higher than 100%. The average total sense of presence felt was greater than 100% in both cases (12.54 and 12.69). These results could have many implications, all of which would need to be independently studied in the future.
3.2. Apparatus The device used for this part of the experiment was the Immersive Visualization Environment, also known as a dome-shaped system (Fig. 1). This state-of-the-art equipment enhances the 3-D virtual environment imaging with four digital projectors and an 80 100 cylindrical screen.
Acknowledgments This effort was supported by an equipment grant from the Army Research Office (ARO). The content of this work does not reflect the position or policy of the ARO and no official endorsement should be inferred.
3.3. Procedure References Each participant was seated in a chair placed at a specific distance away from the screen, providing the individual with a fully-immersed environment and canceling out any outer disturbances as much as possible. Though the environment was controlled, the participant had the ability to freely move his or her body without the restrictions of a helmet or hand-held device. A survey was administered to each participant to measure their subjective sense of presence (the sense of being there in the specified environment), with 10 indicating the highest presence and 0 indicating the lowest. Among the questions asked was, “Rate your sense of presence in the virtual
[1] Usoh, M., Arthur, K., Whitton, M., Bastos, R., Steed, A., Slater, M., Brooks, F. (1999) Walking4Walking-in-Place4Flying, in Virtual Environments. In: Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, pp. 359–364. [2] Nunez, D., Blake, E. (2001) Cognitive presence as a unified concept of virtual reality effectiveness. In: Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Computer Graphics, Virtual Reality and Visualization, South Africa, pp. 115–118. [3] Coelho, C., Tichon, J., Hine, T., Wallis, G., Riva, G. (2006). Media presence and inner presence: the sense of presence in virtual technologies. From Communication to Presence: Cognition, Emotions and Culture toward the Ultimate Communicative Experience, pp. 2–5. [4] J.S. Steuer, Defining virtual reality: dimensions determining telepresence, J. Commun. 4 (1992) 73–93.
Please cite this article as: M.M. North, Distance learning immersive environments: Sense of presence exploration, Journal of Visual Languages and Computing (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jvlc.2014.09.006i
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of Visual Languages and Computing journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jvlc
Distance learning immersive environments: Sense of presence exploration Max M. North Visualization & Simulation Research Center, Engineering Technology and Management, Southern Polytechnic State University, GA, USA
a r t i c l e i n f o
abstract
Article history: Received 22 September 2014 Accepted 24 September 2014
Distance learning technologies are becoming more important for the delivery of content as distance education seems rapidly growing adoption worldwide. These technologies allow collaboration between students and teachers in globally disparate environments. Immersive environments are one recent innovation with significant promise, offering a sense of presence—the sense of “being there”—which can strengthen and reinforce distance learning. The primary purpose of this study is to research the sense of presence using an immersive environment. While this is a work-in-progress, the authors provide preliminary results and conclusions. & 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Distance Learning-VR- Sense of Presence
1. Introduction There are different aspects that make immersive environments (also known as virtual reality) feel as real as possible. One well-known aspect of an immersive environment is “the sense of presence” in the environment. It is often thought of as the feeling in a subject of truly “being there.” In the 1990s, a few theoretical research articles were published in the Journal of Presence, Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the 2000s, researchers increasingly have been exploring this topic, using the knowledge gained from various immersive environments studies to further their applications. In-depth studies into the sense of presence are currently being investigated, but because of the complex nature of this subject, requiring interdisciplinary collaboration and a significant technological investment, they have been very focused and limited to specific studies. This study expands on some unanswered questions in the
E-mail address: [email protected]
literature: What is presence, exactly? Does presence go beyond the physical attributes and into the cognitive mind? What is an immersive environment, and how does a person's sense of presence change in that environment? What factors contribute to the sense of presence in an environment, whether virtual (immersive) or real? What are the best methods and devices used for measuring presence? 2. Sense of presence How is sense of presence defined? In this research paper, we define presence as the awareness or state of mind of being in an environment, whether real or virtual [1,2]. Experiencing a sense of presence can happen whenever a person mentally feels that he or she is present in a situation. For example, when reading a book, some people may feel what the characters are feeling and become wrapped up in the book—they may feel as though they are watching a movie, or have an even deeper connection with the text, “watching” events as they unfold. In 1980, Marvin Minsky coined the term “telepresence” [3]. Minsky described telepresence as “when the virtual
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jvlc.2014.09.006 1045-926X/& 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Please cite this article as: M.M. North, Distance learning immersive environments: Sense of presence exploration, Journal of Visual Languages and Computing (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jvlc.2014.09.006i
M.M. North / Journal of Visual Languages and Computing ] (]]]]) ]]]–]]]
Number of Parcipants
2
Immersive Visualizaon Environment 10 5 0
1
2
3
4 5 6 7 8 9 Quesonarie Rang (10)
10
Fig. 2. Rating of the sense of presence in the virtual world during the experiment in the immersive environment. Fig. 1. This figure depicts several subjects engaged in an Immersive Visualization Environment (Distance Learning).
experience dominates the real world experience. This describes the feeling of actually being in the environment generated by technology instead of being in an actual physical environment” [4]. Over time, the study of “telepresence” yielded to the general study of “presence,” since telepresence is more commonly used with teleoperations [3]. Through research, many articles and journals defined presence differently, but all had general meaning similar to the one elaborated here. 3. Immersive environment experiment 3.1. Participants Thirty-five volunteers participated in this part of the study.
world during the experiment.” A graph of the results for this question is shown in Fig. 2. 4. Preliminary results and conclusions A majority of participants experienced a strong sense of presence of the virtual world in the immersive environment: 86% of the participants—30 individuals—responded with a rating between 7 and 9, indicating that the participants felt a high sense presence in the immersive environment. Perhaps an interesting part of this study is found in the total sense of presence scores. While reason would indicate that a subject0 s total degree of immersion in concurrent environments should be 100% (or ten on the rating scale in this study), from a subjective point of view the total degree of immersion may be considerably higher than 100%. The average total sense of presence felt was greater than 100% in both cases (12.54 and 12.69). These results could have many implications, all of which would need to be independently studied in the future.
3.2. Apparatus The device used for this part of the experiment was the Immersive Visualization Environment, also known as a dome-shaped system (Fig. 1). This state-of-the-art equipment enhances the 3-D virtual environment imaging with four digital projectors and an 80 100 cylindrical screen.
Acknowledgments This effort was supported by an equipment grant from the Army Research Office (ARO). The content of this work does not reflect the position or policy of the ARO and no official endorsement should be inferred.
3.3. Procedure References Each participant was seated in a chair placed at a specific distance away from the screen, providing the individual with a fully-immersed environment and canceling out any outer disturbances as much as possible. Though the environment was controlled, the participant had the ability to freely move his or her body without the restrictions of a helmet or hand-held device. A survey was administered to each participant to measure their subjective sense of presence (the sense of being there in the specified environment), with 10 indicating the highest presence and 0 indicating the lowest. Among the questions asked was, “Rate your sense of presence in the virtual
[1] Usoh, M., Arthur, K., Whitton, M., Bastos, R., Steed, A., Slater, M., Brooks, F. (1999) Walking4Walking-in-Place4Flying, in Virtual Environments. In: Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, pp. 359–364. [2] Nunez, D., Blake, E. (2001) Cognitive presence as a unified concept of virtual reality effectiveness. In: Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Computer Graphics, Virtual Reality and Visualization, South Africa, pp. 115–118. [3] Coelho, C., Tichon, J., Hine, T., Wallis, G., Riva, G. (2006). Media presence and inner presence: the sense of presence in virtual technologies. From Communication to Presence: Cognition, Emotions and Culture toward the Ultimate Communicative Experience, pp. 2–5. [4] J.S. Steuer, Defining virtual reality: dimensions determining telepresence, J. Commun. 4 (1992) 73–93.
Please cite this article as: M.M. North, Distance learning immersive environments: Sense of presence exploration, Journal of Visual Languages and Computing (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jvlc.2014.09.006i