The influence of visual realism on the sense of presence in virtual environments

Virtual reality is increasingly being used for a wide range of academic, entertainment, training, and therapeutic purposes. The technology allows individuals to be completely immersed in an environment, and interact with it as if the environment is real. If this leads to the individuals feeling as if they are physically present in the environment, it can be said that they experience a high sense of presence: The sense of being there in an environment, whilst being physically situated in another. A high sense of presence is needed in order to make the experience feel real, that is: The individual experiencing the virtual environment should not be conscious of the external environment and the medium needed to navigate through and interact with the environment. But does realism in itself also affect the experienced sense of presence? More specifically, do visually realistic environments that highly resemble a corresponding real environment evoke a higher sense of presence than unrealistic environments? Earlier research has examined whether visual realism affects the sense of presence in virtual reality applications. However, several contradicting results were found, from which no clear conclusion could be made. The overall lack of consistent findings may be attributed to the realistic environments utilized in prior research not being truly visually realistic, caused by the relatively low computational power available in the past and the lack of user friendly environment design software. This study examined the effects of visual realism on presence and anxiety, replicating and improving the previous research by utilizing a visually highly realistic cliff environment. Fifty-two participants experienced a visually highly realistic and unrealistic cliff environment, with the order of experiencing the realistic or unrealistic environment first being counterbalanced. They were asked to cross a wooden bridge and count the amount of rocks in the water approximately 30 meters below them. Their experienced sense of presence was measured with the IPQ questionnaire, whilst anxiety was measured by self-reported items, heart-rate, and GSR. The results showed that increasing visual realism led to an increase in presence. However, only a very small and open to debate effect of visual realism on anxiety was found: The first cliff environment evoked higher anxiety than the second cliff environment, especially if the realistic environment was presented first. The novelty effect however was stronger than the effect of realism, and trait anxiety for fear of heights also influenced self-reported anxiety. The findings indicate that visual realism may indeed positively affect presence, but is of less importance to height-related anxiety. Table of contents