Understanding spatial presence formation and maintenance in virtual reality for younger and older adults

Abstract

Background: Virtual reality (VR) has the potential to benefit physical, cognitive, and socioemotional well-being across a wide spectrum of domains. For the benefits of VR to be fully realized, people must experience spatial presence in the digital environment. We developed the Magnet Model of Spatial Presence as a framework to integrate the extant literature, identify gaps, and delineate the spatial presence formation and maintenance processes in virtual reality. Given that perception and attention are key components of the spatial presence process, age-related changes in these abilities might impact older adults' ability to develop and maintain spatial presence in a virtual environment.Objective: This research study aimed to address limitations in the literature by assessing various aspects of the spatial presence process for younger and older adults. The objectives were to evaluate how long it takes to form spatial presence; the extent that spatial presence is experienced and if it changes over several hours of time with experience; how well people maintain presence; and how well they recover from breaks in the spatial presence experience. Method: Participants were twenty-five younger adults and twenty-five older adults. The VR apparatus was an HTC Vive and the VR experiences included one passive experience and one active experience. Participation occurred for three days. Results: Most aspects of the spatial presence process were similar for older and younger adults. Presence formation occurred quickly, levels of presence were high and generally maintained over several hours of time. Younger adults experienced more breaks in presence than older adults, but all participants were generally able to easily recover from breaks in presence. Conclusion: These findings provide insights on presence formation, levels, maintenance, and break recovery. The results illustrate the potential of virtual reality for both younger and older adults.

How Much Presence is Enough? Qualitative Scales for Interpreting the Igroup Presence Questionnaire Score

“…While literature is scarce and, yet, not consensual regarding the impact of age on the reported sense of presence (e.g. [71]- [73]), this is an important point to address in future studies. Also, a factor that was not possible to accomplish was to output a qualitative scale for each type of VR setup (non-immersive, semi-immersive and fully immersive) due to the dataset distribution.…”

Examining the Role of Visual Attention in Determining Presence: A Novel Application of Feature Integration Theory to Immersive Virtual Reality

“…Interestingly, Dilanchian et al's (2021) results show a significant age difference in presence where older adults experienced higher presence than did younger adults. While these results may contrast on the surface, it is likely that Dilanchian et al's (2021) While Dilanchian et al's (2021) and Mitzner et al's (2021) findings are important, the knowledge that individuals vary in their ability to experience presence does little to inform how virtual environments and virtual interactions might be modified to enhance presence. An understanding of environmental and interaction factors that suppress or facilitate presence could help develop more impactful IVR interactions and more successful IVR interventions.…”

“…2 Individual Differences in Presence Formation and Maintenance Mitzner et al (2021) built upon and extended the two-stage presence model by adding these "person factors"; they state that individual difference factors can affect the formation, degree, maintenance, and restoration of presence within an IVR experience. This expanded model is called the Magnet Model of Spatial Presence (MMSP) and it proposes that these "person factors" influence a 'push-and-pull' competition between the experience of the virtual and physical environments.…”

“…In this way, the MMSP suggests that stimuli from both worlds are constantly playing "tug-of-war" wherein a user's experience of being in the real or virtual world is pulled to one interpretation or the other based on the salience of the respective stimuli and the consistency of stimuli with one world or another. Additionally, the MMSP considers possible 'breaks in presence' where an immersed user becomes "suddenly aware of their actual location in the physical environment" and, in turn, must "restart the entire formation process" (Mitzner et al, 2021). The processing of cues from the virtual and physical world, and their integration, relies on a host of perceptual and cognitive abilities, some of which differ as a function of age, one of the individual difference factors used to explore how person factors affect presence level, formation, maintenance, and break recovery.…”

“…To test the components of the MMSP, Mitzner et al (2021) conducted a study examining the impact of individual difference factors on level of presence, its formation, its maintenance, and time to recover from presence breaks. Presence was measured in younger and older adults, and age was intended to serve as a manipulation of individual differences in spatial and attentional processing abilities relevant to presence.…”