The viewing angle dependency in the presence of wide field image viewing and its relationship to the evaluation indices

Abstract It is well known that presence from video systems increases as the viewing angle increases. Unfortunately, the quantitative evaluation of presence is very difficult. Previous evaluations attempted to determine both subjective and objective assessments. In this paper, we have quantified presence by varying the video system-viewing angle along with subjective evaluations using well-selected matched words and an objective measurement of the viewers' body sway. We have also examined the correlation between the indices used in order to quantify presence. The results indicated that the assessment by subjective evaluation of ‘the sense of presence’ had good repeatability, and that the correlation between the evaluation word ‘presence’ and ‘powerfulness’ was comparatively high but that it was almost zero between ‘presence’ and the total distance of viewers' body sway. This suggested that subjective evaluations using the words ‘presence’ and ‘powerfulness’ were both valid to assess presence, and that the subjective evaluation of presence did not correlate with body sway for each experimental trial, though their means did show comparable tendencies.