Measurement of Presence in large scale Virtual environments

It is now widely accepted that a sense of presence in a virtual environment is a crucial part of the success of the ‘experience’. This paper extends the authors previous work in naturalistic interfaces and perception of image to test experimentally the degree to which the type of interface and visual nature of the virtual environment determine the experience of presence or ‘being there’ in a large scale architectural virtual environment. The importance of presence to the success of architectural virtual environments is an important discussion. Should architectural VEs strive to be hyper-real (with all the attendant hardware issues of manipulating large amounts of data in real-time) or does a degree of abstraction in representation still afford an acceptable degree of presence?