Formation of Spatial Presence: By Form or Content?

Spatial presence, among the many aspects of presence, is the sense of physical and concrete space, often dubbed as the sense of “being there.” This paper theorizes on how “spatial” presence is formed by various types of artificial cues in a virtual environment, form or content. We believe that spatial presence is a product of an unconscious effort to correctly register oneself into the virtual environment in a consistent manner. We hypothesize that this process is perceptual, and bottomup in nature, and rooted in the reflexive and adaptive behavior to react and resolve the mismatch in the spatial cues between the physical space where the user is and the virtual space where the user looks at, hears from and interacts with. Hinted from the fact that our brain has two major paths for processing sensory input, the “where” path for determining object locations, and “what” path for identifying objects, we categorize the sensory stimulation cues in the virtual environment accordingly and investigate in their relationships as how they affect the user in adaptively registering oneself into the virtual environment, thus creating spatial presence. Based on the results of series of our experiments and other bodies of research, we postulate that while low level and perceptual spatial cues are sufficient for creating spatial presence, they can be affected and modulated by the spatial (whether form or content) factors. These results provide important insights into constructing a model of spatial presence, its measurement, and guidelines for configuring locationbased virtual reality applications.