Virtual Tourism in a Game Environment: Untangling Judged Affordances and Sense of Place

The present study enriches and deepens understanding of the concepts of telepresence and sense of place, by examining their relevance to capture a place experience evoked in 3D environments through a research design that includes the affordance concept in virtual tourism. Many previous presence studies concern the in-the-moment experience without modeling the relationship with response variables that can help explain behavior in the digital or the material space. In this paper we tested affordance as the response variable in two different research models. The participants in our experiment explored the city of Los Angeles in a virtual environment (VE). Often, though not always, the participants had a feeling of “being there.” The results indicated that both concepts – telepresence and sense of place – can be used to measure the user experience in a VE. Telepresence appears to be a more reliable predictor than the alternative concept sense of place, but its meaning aspect is generally less well known, particularly with regard to a tourist’s intended activities and relevant affordances during a visit to a place.