The presence research community would benefit from a reliable and valid crossmedia presence measure that allows results from different laboratories to be compared and a more comprehensive knowledge base to be developed. The ITC-Sense of Presence Inventory (ITC-SOPI) is a new state questionnaire measure whose development has been informed by previous research on the determinants of presence and current self-report measures. It focuses on users' experiences of media, with no reference to objective system parameters. More than 600 people completed the ITC-SOPI following an experience with one of a range of noninteractive and interactive media. Exploratory analysis (principal axis factoring) revealed four factors: Sense of Physical Space, Engagement, Ecological Validity, and Negative Effects. Relations between the factors and the consistency of the factor structure with others reported in the literature are discussed. Preliminary analyses described here demonstrate that the ITC-SOPI is reliable and valid, but more rigorous testing of its psychometric properties and applicability to interactive virtual environments is required. Subject to satisfactory confirmatory analyses, the ITC-SOPI will offer researchers using a range of media systems a tool with which to measure four facets of a media experience that are putatively related to presence.
Computer games are ideally placed to form the content of future Immersive Media, but this prospect is faced with both technical and usability issues. This paper describes an experiment in immersive gaming using a state-of-the-art computer First Person Shooter (FPS) game, in which we analyze user experience and performance through a combination of in-game metrics, questionnaires and subjective reports. We describe the evaluation of a major commercial computer game as a real-time immersive stereoscopic experience based on a four-screen CAVE TM -like installation. The implementation is based on a bespoke VR middleware developed on top of the game's own engine. Our results show an overwhelming subjective preference for the immersive version despite a decrease in performance attributed to a more realistic aiming mechanism. More importantly, metrics suggest that users took advantage of the immersive context rather than simply transposing their desktop gaming skills.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.