igroup presence questionnaire (IPQ) overview

Update from Thomas and Holger, 30 March 2025

It's been over 20 years since we developed the Igroup Presence Questionnaire. We are pleased to see that this instrument is still in use, and, apparently, even increasingly so. The little paper we wrote as Master and PhD students became a citation classic, with over 2500 citations on Google Scholar. Thank you research community! With your help, we've learned a lot over the years, and we want to share some main aspects with you here:

Our former PhD student Tanh, who is now Dr Tran!, analysed your studies, and we are presenting the lessons we learned in this paper:

Tran, T. Q., Langlotz, T., Young, J., Schubert, T. W., & Regenbrecht, H. (2024). Classifying presence scores: Insights and analysis from two decades of the igroup presence questionnaire (ipq). ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 31(5), 1-26. https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3689046

For instance, we recommend to always use the full item list of the IPQ and not only selected subscales, to move to a 7-point -3 .. +3 scale, and to cross-validate the different language versions of the IPQ before or with usage.

Tanh also looked into presence measures for mixed reality (MR, AR, XR) since many of you have used the IPQ in its original or in a revised/amended form to measure MR experiences. While we understand that using a VR presence scale is better than nothing, it comes with some significant limitations. Please read our paper:

Tran, T. Q., Langlotz, T., & Regenbrecht, H. (2024, May). A survey on measuring presence in mixed reality. Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-38). https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3613904.3642383

Also, if you want to know more about where we are conceptually coming from with presence, then please have a look at our introductory, more "opinion piece style" article on this. Here, we believe, two aspects make VR so powerful and unique: (1) its embodied interaction character and (2) its ability to turn non-projectable properties into projectable properties. Have a read and you see what we mean!

Regenbrecht, H. and Schubert, T. W. (2022). Designing for Presence: Embodied Interaction in Computer-Mediated Realities. In Nowostawski, M. and Regenbrecht, H. Festschrift for Martin Purvis. An Information Science Renaissance Man. College Publications: Rickmansworth/UK, 2023. https://www.hci.otago.ac.nz/papers/RegenbrechtPSYARXIV2023.pdf

Finally, Tanh produced an interactive web-based tool for the meta-analysis of IPQ data, which you can find here:

https://hci.otago.ac.nz/ipqcal/.

Collegial Greetings from Norway and New Zealand

Igroup Presence Questionnaire (IPQ)

• Read more about the construction and the structure of the scale
• Download the items of the IPQ and see what else we typically assess
• Read more about and download the data we provide
• See two reliability and factor analyses of these IPQ data

Overview

We understand the sense of presence as the subjective sense of being in a virtual environment. Importantly, the sense of presence can be separated from the ability of a technology to immerse a user. While this immersion is a variable of the technology and can be desribed objectively, presence is a variable of a user's experience. Therefore, we obtain measures of the sense of presence from subjective rating scales.

The Igroup Presence Questionnaire (IPQ) is a scale for measuring the sense of presence experienced in a virtual environment (VE). It has been constructed using a large pool of items and two survey waves with approximately 500 participants. It was originally constructed in German, but is now also available in English and Dutch. The item pool included both previously published items (translated into German) and new items. The IPQ, as we now publish and release it, also includes both types of items.

The current version of the IPQ has three subscales and one additional general item not belonging to a subscale. The three subscales emerged from principal component analyses and can be regarded as fairly independent factors. They are:

1. Spatial Presence - the sense of being physically present in the VE
2. Involvement - measuring the attention devoted to the VE and the involvmenet experienced
3. Experienced Realism - measuring the subjective experience of realism in the VE

The additional general item assesses the general "sense of being there", and has high loadings on all three factors, with an especially strong loading on Spatial Presence.

The release of the questionnaire has the goal of making it available free of charge. Note that the English version of the questionnaire contains some items previously published by other authors. Those items are marked in the questionnaire.

Along with the items, we also provide data collected with the IPQ items. The data are supplemented by information on the participants and the technology used. You may realize that the publication of raw data is still a rather unusal step in the scientific community. The goal of this step is to provide you with a solid basis for understanding the data you collect with the IPQ. Furthermore, we strongly encourage all researchers who are collecting data with the IPQ to add those data to the database.