www.igroup.org – project consortium
a multi-disciplinary project consortium.
addresses new interfaces between humans and the real and virtual environment.
defines itself through project work.
Presence means the experience of being in a virtual environment. Probably everybody who has used a virtual reality system or a sophisticated 3D-game has experienced presence him- or herself. People who are present in a virtual environment have the experience of actually being in the virtual place, they focus their attention on the virtual environment and they experience it as somehow real.
Presence is probably the central variable for interfaces and applications in virtual environments. We can assume - and is has been shown in some cases - that presence is important for learning and training in virtual environments, for enjoyment and fun, and for experiencing real emotions in virtual environments.
The Presence Questionnaire project is an ongoing project that started in 1997. The goal was and is to develop, validate, and use a subjective measure of presence, a scale consisting of not to much items. Building on earlier questionnaires and on a theoretical model of the presence experiences, we first developed a large pool of items. These items were then answered in an Internet survey by over 240 participants (Phase 1). These data were analysed using statistical methods, and the resulting scale was again tested in a second survey on the Internet, again with over 200 participants (Phase 2). As a result, we came up with a 13-item scale measuring spatial presence, involvement, and sense of realness in a virtual environment. We call this scale the Igroup Presence Questionnaire (IPQ). We offer a German and an English version of the scale; colleagues from Amsterdam have translated it into Dutch, and a Spanish translation is almost finished. The questionnaire can be used in evaluation studies on virtual environments.
You can read more about the IPQ, downloads of the scale and sample data, and background on theory and analyses, at http://www.igroup.org/pq/ipq/
Schubert, T., Friedmann, F., & Regenbrecht, H. (2001). The experience of presence: Factor analytic insights. Presence: Teleoperators and virtual environments, 10(3), 266-281.
Schubert, T., Friedmann, F., & Regenbrecht, H. (1999). Embodied Presence in Virtual Environments. In Ray Paton & Irene Neilson (Eds.), Visual Representations and Interpretations. (pp. 269-278). London: Springer-Verlag. Paper presented at VRI '98, Liverpool, 22nd - 24th of September, 1998.