Presence in the environment: theories, methodologies and applications to video games

Many authors maintain in their work that the presence feeling in the virtual universe only survives if the player is unaware of the technical interference. The technical system is a mediation between the subject body and the virtual environment. There are many ways to theorise this mediation and therefore many types of explanations given to explain the fact that the user is no longer aware of the technical system. The more common is the "immersion theory". This is a technical theory. We propose a more psychological theory based on activity theories. We think that the transparency of the mediation appears with the subject practise and the increase of it. We propose a new methodology to assess the feeling of presence to show that this feeling varies during the activity. We don't find that the more a subject is experienced the more he feels present. We discuss this result and conclude that there's a complex relation between the feeling pf presence and the transparency of the mediation. We find that the feeling of presence varies according to the activity. This second result can't be explained by the theory of immersion. This result support our proposition but we need more results to conclude.

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