hello my name is Crescent Chico and I'm
a lecturer in ATI within the department
of computer science at the University of
bath in the UK this is our paper titled
imagine that imaginative suggestibility
affects presence and virtual reality
this is a collaborative work between the
universities of bath Bristol and King's
College London in the UK
The increased sense of presence afforded
by VR had mounted displays is perhaps
the single most important characteristic
that distinguishes them from the more
conventional 2D screens
according to the definition given by
vidmer and Zinger in 1998 presence is a
construct refers to the user's
subjective feeling of actually being in
a place or environment even when they
are situated in another presence is
instrumental to variety of your
applications from those meant for
entertainment such as games to learning
training Rehabilitation and
desensitization
furthermore presidents have an often
operationalizes a singular construct
when in fact it can be divided into
three subtypes spatial presence refers
to the sense of being spatially located
in a virtual space social presence is
the sense of sharing the same space with
another social agent while self-presence
represents the coherence between the
actual self and the self-presented in
the virtual environment which in some
cases is represented by an avatar
personality characteristics have long
been shown to affect how much presence
and individual experiences in VR with
little consensus on the directionality
of those effects however
still some personality characteristics
including spatial intelligence
introversion and anxiety have been shown
to support the formation of presence
despite the added immersion and sense of
presence provided by VR experiences it
is still a niche technology that does
not seem to appeal to everyone
while some technical factors such as
display quality have improved markedly
other technical factors like headset
weight are still problematic similar
design issues have been have led to some
researchers to declare that VR is sexist
in its design as device characteristics
appear to cause more VR sickness in
women than men
one trait however which remained
unexplored in the context of the art
presence was that of imaginative
suggestibility imagine that their
suggestibilities the ability of an
individual to successfully experience an
imaginary scenario as if it were real so
for example imagining that a heavy book
is placed on your hand or is under a
stream of flowing water
well imagine that this suggestibility
can provide deeper understanding of an
individual feelings of presence other
techniques are required to enhance it
one such technique that has been shown
promise in enhancing presence and which
could be linked to suggestibility is
priming priming involves being exposed
to stimuli prior to an experience in the
hope that the experience the exposure
subsequently impacts the processing of
elements related to set stimuli that
exist in the experience recently
research has shown how priming can
potentially enhance social and spatial
presence researchers have also explored
how it may be possible to Prime users to
increase their sense of presence in VR
it is unclear the whether this effect is
mediated by suggestibility or not
developing a better understanding of how
human factors influence formation of
presence is key to improving people's
experience in VR this is especially
relevant to VR content designers who aim
to engage wider populations of potential
users
additionally exploring approaches that
might allow VR designers to not only
understand who will experience presence
but understand how to influence and
increase levels of presence across all
users will help accelerate the growth
and Adoption of VR in order to address
these research gaps we post the
following research questions first we
asked what is the role of suggestibility
in the formation of spatial social and
self-presence and secondly do
individuals who are more suggestible
benefit from priming in the context of
VR
now as to what was done in the study we
recruited a total of 128 participants
and we adopted it between participants
design with four groups depending on the
type of priming they receive prior to
the VR experience
free priming materials were created
providing prior information on either
the space of the virtual environment the
order of our Tara's presence present and
the experience or their own character
the priming material was created so as
to be historically accurate than it
would administered in an audio format
prior to the VR experience
to measure all three types of presence
we use the multimodal presence scale
this is one of the few skills that
distinguish between the three types of
presence and has been validated in VR
before to measure imaginative
suggestibility we used an audio version
of the creative imagination scale
professional actor was hired to record
12 suggestions which were then
administered to the users in the
soundproof room to avoid any noise
interference the users indicated how
Vivid was each of the 12 suggestions and
this created the overall score for
suggestibility
a custom VR environment was developed
which depicted a historically accurate
impression of the ancient Oracle of the
dona
the VR Oracle or vro environment is a
seven minute first person VR experience
the user embodies the character of a
slave who ran away and reached the
sanctuary of the Dona the environment is
separated into different scenes with
each scene telling the story of an
ancient man or woman as they consult the
oracle Greek actors were hired to voice
the characters in the virtual
environment so as to create the more
authentic experience which was recorded
in the English language
the avatars were animated using motion
tracking data from the same actors who
performed all the scenes a theme of
ancient historians were involved
designing the narrative physical
environment characters and speech
content so as for it to be historically
accurate details such as period accurate
clothing and color Shades were all
implemented to make vro usable
educational tool here you can see a
snapshot of the final scene
we offer a libation
great in strength accept this rule
results indicated imaginative
suggestibility was strongly correlated
with all types of presence and this
trend was uniform no effects of priming
were found however which could suggest
that the primary material you used was
not comprehensive enough to provide
enough prior information this could be
due to it being reduced to the auditory
modality and to a minute long recording
rather than more expansive descriptions
as were used in past literature where
priming effects were found
and to summarize the results first we
provide evidence the suggestibility is
an important factor that contributes to
the formation of spatial social and
self-presence second we found the
suggestibility not gender is important
for the formation of Social and spatial
presence
third both gender and suggestibility are
important factors in the formation of
self-presence still the uniform affects
the suggestibility across types of
presence or outstanding other
personality traits such as extroversion
agreeableness or empathy could have more
pronounced effects on certain subtypes
of presence because they more
specifically change the way social
information is interpreted
imagine that the suggestibility in
contrast seems to be robust to the
user's internal processing of different
content elements in the virtual
environment our results could explain
this because some gender differences
previously found in VR literature May in
fact be partially due to user
variability in the level of imaginative
suggestibility in particular we found
that despite the fact that female users
scored
significantly higher in spatial presence
and social presence compared to males
this effect disappeared when accounting
for suggestibility this means that
females May interact with the VR content
differently to males due to their
increased level of imaginative
suggestibility
in essence suggestibility could present
an interesting user trait for VR
developers to leverage with the scope of
enhancing presence in VR this is all the
more enticing given its uniform positive
effects on all types of presence it is
ultimately unclear how exactly increased
imaginative suggestibility can lead to
increases in presence one possibility is
that individuals who are more
suggestible can fill in the gaps in
graphical or other technical
shortcomings of the VR experience
so for example they can see a pixelated
objects but mentally replace it with a
visually richer image of said object
equally though they may simply be more
able to ignore technical limitations in
the environment
overall our results reinforce the idea
that realism is a more abstract term
than previously considered in literature
ultimately we can say that what the user
perceives as realistic is not strictly a
result of technical factors that make a
virtual environment look or sound closer
to the real world but instead is heavily
determined by how the user internalizes
that environment and with that I wish to
say thank you for listening and I hope
you found our study interesting