hello my name is Grace and jiko and I'm
a lecturer in HCI within the department
of computer science at the University of
bath in the UK in this video I'll be
presenting our paper titled realism and
field of view affect presence in VR but
not the way you think the increased
sense of presence afforded by VR head
mounted displays is perhaps the single
most important characteristic that
distinguishes them from 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're situated in another
immersion instead refers to the atone
objective property of the system and to
the extent to which you can Engage The
user's sensory motor channels and
perception of the virtual environment
critically the level of immersion
provided by the system may affect the
illusion of being in the virtual world
and the process by which presence is
created can be described as a
negotiation between the user and the
technical or immersive qualities of the
system
over the last three decades there have
been considerable improvements in the
technical capabilities of commercial VR
headsets however despite these
technological advances there are certain
characteristics such as visual realism
and the field of view of the headset
that compete for limited computational
resources as designers and VR
experiences still need to prioritize
certain features over others when
designing VR Hardware or content for the
masses
this raises questions about how
technical factors interact with each
other to affect presence and to date
there has been little to no systematic
in combinatorial investigation
from the multitude of technical factors
that characterize VR headsets perhaps
the most important for presence and yet
computationally taxing are the visual
realism of the environment and what
concerns software and the field of view
in terms of Hardware facilitating higher
visual realism comes with increased
demand for computational power because
more detailed objects have to be
rendered on the screen Furthermore with
increased field of view comes the added
cost of a larger more costly display
maximizing both realism of the
environment and field of view is not yet
viable for Consumer grade hardware and
especially on portable head mounted
displays with limited computational
power
this is especially relevant for
consumers as cost and portability are
significant prohibitive factors that
hinder user adoption of VR headsets
it is thus crucial to First understand
the actual benefits for user presence of
increased visual realism and field of
view in order to inform guidelines for
both consumer grade VR Hardware
engineers and content creators however
assessing technical factors alone in the
absence of human ones would not offer a
compelling image of the formation of
presence
in addition to the immersive quality of
a VR setup research has shown how human
factors can affect the user's presence
the emotions felt by the user and their
perceived agency within a virtual
environment have been identified as
important factors that affect presence
and there are complex interactions that
occur during this process emotions that
rate highly on arousal for example in
particular fear appeared to hold a
special place and the formation of
presence having a strong evolutionary
importance furthermore eliciting the
sense of fear is at the center of a wide
range of VR applications
theory is not only important in itself
but can change the way other factors
affect presence in a recent study jiko
atol found that the user's sense of
agency affected presence in a
fear-inducing virtual environment but
not in happiness inducing virtual
environment this highlights how the
formation of presence is determined by
interactions within human factors and
shows that we cannot understand how
technical Factor influences presence
unless we systematically consider its
effects in combination with human
factors such as fear and agency
in order to address these research gaps
we post the following research questions
first of all we asked how do visual
realism end the field of view affect
your presence and secondly how can we
describe the formation of your presence
based on Technical and human factors
to answer these questions we collected a
new large data set and used it to create
a novel structural equation model
including the technical factors realism
and field of view
and also the human factors agency and
emotion when considering emotion what
our particular focus is on fear is to
hold significant importance to the VR
industry and is shown to have intricate
relationships with technical factors
agency and also presence
in order to systematically investigate
the effects of emotions agency visual
realism and field of view we adopted a
combinatorial design where each of the
design variables had two levels for
emotion and agency we either induce fear
or happiness each with or without agency
this is identical to Jay collett's whole
study visual realism was manipulated to
either be high or low while the field of
view is either wide or narrow
in order to conduct a structural
equation model we adopted between
participants design which resulted in 16
experimental groups in total a number of
360 participants were recruited which
was based on a sample size calculation
the same VR environments were used as
from jicolatol for continuity the happy
environment presented a park during
daytime where a friendly dog was present
and the non-agency condition the user
would just observe the dog while in the
agency one they would interact with it
via laser pointer the fear-inducing
environment was the same part but at
night and the dog was replaced by a wolf
looking creature that would attack the
participant in the non-agency condition
they could not do anything to defend
themselves while in the agency one
they had the flashlight that they could
shine in the wolf's face to make it go
away
we designed a custom Unity toolbox to
manipulate technical factors as seen on
the side and this was used to reduce
texture resolution and level of detail
for a lower visual realism conditions as
well as change between a wide 130
degrees field of view and the 90 degrees
and the high visual realism conditions
we improved the graphics further from
the original while in the low visual
realism ones we further decreased them
from the original
and here is an example of a happy
environment with agency
and this is the same environment but
this time with low technical factors
observed the poor realism and narrower
field of view
and here is the fear-inducing scene with
agency and high realism and white field
of view as another example
our most important contribution is the
tafira model a structural equation model
that describes how design decisions
technical factors and human factors as
well combine and interact in the
formation of presence
highlighted here are the design factors
and their interactions we found that
realism only contributes to presence in
the fear scenario that design decisions
to instill fear an agency contribute
directly but also interact in the
process of determining what users feel
finally a wider field of view only
contributes to presence when the user is
also afforded agency and this is a
direct influence on presence rather than
for felt emotions or agency
in conclusion our results clarify the
intricate ways in which human and
Technical factors can interact in the
formation of VR presence from our top
fear model it becomes apparent the
designers cannot ignore the influence of
human factors When developing VR
experiences more precisely
it is the technical factors that should
be adapted according to the specific
emotion and level of agency afforded to
the user given the importance of the
latter ultimately technical factors need
to be optimized due to limitations in
computational power and high component
cost that still characterize VR head
mounted displays our model provides a
framework for doing such an optimization
while prioritizing the user experience
when designing virtual environments
meant to elicit fear in particular the
top fear model can be interpreted as a
structured decision tree whereby the
purpose of a VR application determines
its properties and those of the head
mounted display delivering it in cases
where the dominant intended emotion is
fear gain designers should prioritize
the enhancement of visual realism in
such cases head mounted displays with a
higher fov of about 90 degrees threshold
should be required only for experiences
that afford users agency such as
interactive games or training
applications the top fear model
illustrates previously unexplored
interactions such as between the field
of view and agency as well as providing
a broader overview of how the most
prominent human technical factors come
together to form presence what the model
also demonstrates is the necessity to
adopt a broader view when investigating
user factors or binary relationships
between them tap fear suggests that VR
technology has come a long way so since
its early days and improvements to
technical features may have reached the
point of diminishing returns for
presence
thank you very much for listening and I
hope you enjoyed