Comparing Presence and Immersion in Three Different Collaborative Virtual

Environments by Applying A Consolidated Questionnaire

701 Virtual Reality Course

Lecturer: Assoc. Prof. Veysi İşler

Çağlayan Karapınar

Middle East Technical University Department of Computer Engineering

Agenda

Motivation Research Question Related Work Research Method Experiments Results and Discussion

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Motivation CVE (Collaborative Virtual Environments) are the communities where you can

meet with new people, go for shopping, entertain, make money, go to new place that you can never see in real life and create new things that is based on your imagination.

CVEs are very important infrastuructures for eLearning platforms The soft skills and services business like consultancy run on these CVEs.Some

of the organizations and international companies run their recruitment process on these platforms, do their marketing activities on these environments . As most of the futurists underlines: The future business will run on these infrastructures.

By the end of this year, 80 percent of active Internet users will have an avatar in CVEs. [1]

Presence and immersion concepts have been analyzed from theoritical point of view, especially on its definition .

Collaborative Virtual Environment(CVE)s are suitable environments to be used as a test bed to work on presence and immersion in a practical approach.

[1]Virtual Life D2.1: End User Definition and needs WP2 Service and System Design AUTHOR Geumacs

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Most Popular Virtual Worlds

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Research Question

This research aims to find which are the most important and critical factors to increase the presence and immersion in a Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) by comparing 3 different MUVE so that the design process of these CVEs can be improved.

Which factors increase the degree of presence and immersion in CVEs most?

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SecondLife Second Life (SL) is a virtual world developed by 

Linden Labs. Launched on June 23, 2003. Secondlife is a Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) that international companies run their recruitment process on these platforms, do their marketing activities, sell their goods and services on these environments.Used mostly for Social Networking.

Currently there are nearly 30 million residents in SecondLife (SL). SL has its own economic dynamics. It has its own money unit called Linden. At SL, there are stores that people sell and buy things. So many kinds of consultancy work can be performed at SL. All the sectors in the real world also exist in SL. SL is a full 3D Virtual Environment.

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Aircraft Museum – Second Life

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Kaneva Kaneva started development on theVirtual World of

Kaneva, the company’s flagship product The Virtual World of Kaneva was released into beta in mid 2006.

The source code is hidden but still available to everyone on the resources page at in their developer web site.

2 million members currently. In the first quarter of 2010 Kaneva released their

Kaneva 3D Applications and their 3D App Game Developer Program.

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Prehistoric Museum - Kaneva

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Habbo

The service began in 2000 and has expanded to include 32 online communities (or "hotels").

 As of June 2008 over 118 million avatars have been registered. There are an average 8 million unique visitors monthly and 75,000 avatars are being created every day.

2D environment No client installation

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History Museum - Habbo

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Related Work 1A Simulation of a Fire Accident in Second Life

[2]

Simulating the evacuation of an office building

can be helpful to better prepare the potential

occupants in the event of fire.

Virtual environments are the ideal candidates for

this type of simulations because they allow testing of numerous

scenarios with minimal costs.

Tests were conducted on various groups of users to analyze

their behavior and reactions and experienced through a virtual

environment during a dangerous situation.

Experienced Second Life users has panicked less as they percieve differently.

A Simulation of a Fire Accident in Second Life

Paolo Buono, Tiziana Cortese, Fabrizio Lionetti, Marco Minoia, Adalberto Simeone Dipartimento di Informatica, University of Bari , simeone@di.uniba.it

PRESENCE 2008 -Proceedings of the 11th Annual International Workshop on Presence 12

Related Work 2The Correlation between Presence and avatars In a study [3] Observation and interviews were conducted within 2 cases: Case I consisted of

12 graduate science education students participating in their first online course.

Case II consisted of 14 undergraduates. Results suggest students’ avatars provide a sense of presence that is the catalyst for community and learning.

By increasing presence, the success rate of exploiting from these environments will increase. In conclusion, avatars vital role for increasing the presence has been underlined.

Presence and Task Correlation In another study, [4] conducted on 26 students :13 Virtual Reality environment and 13 video

environment has been set. Performed multiplication on 2D and 3D virtual reality env. As a result, Presence and immersion increased the feeling and sense during performing the related tasks.

[3]Creating Presence and Community in a Synchronous Virtual Learning Environment Using Avatars Leonard A. Annetta, Shawn Holmes USA Vol3. No.8 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY

AND DISTANCE LEARNING August 2006 Volume 3 Number 8 ISSN 1550-6908

[4] The Effects of Fully Immersive Virtual Reality on the Learning of Physical Tasks

Kayur Patel Computer Science and Engineering University of Washington Seattle, WA

kayur@cs.washington.edu – Presence 2006

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Related Work 3In a study conducted in Italia [5], presence notion has been questioned and examined

in the Second Life environment. Social Interaction Questionnaire (SIQ) has been applied to 25 university students.

It is an interesting finding in that study that increasing the control capabilities and playing with the control so much to increase the presence, diminishes the involvement so immersion by decreasing the quality of the user experience as an avatar in the CVE.

This leads us to a very important best practice; while designing CVEs; we have to take into account and pay attention on the control of the avatar. During this CVE design process, there is a very subtle equilibrium point to make the control mechanism to increase presence.

In the social learning theory that Bandura proposed, the constructivist method is employed most. This means that the interaction and socialization process of the students in the medium is a tool for learning. Bandura’s Social Learning Theory has been examined on Second Life including the presence concept[6]

[5]Individual differences in virtual environments. An experimental research on emotions, behaviour and sense of presence in Second Life

Maria Grazia Strepparava1, Marco Omar Harb1, Selena Russo1, Federico Zorzi1, Alessandro Rizzi2

1Multimedia Health Communication Laboratory (MHCL), Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca,

2Dipartimento di Tecnologie dell’Informazione, Università degli Studi di Milano

[6] Social Learning Theory in Second Life

Michele Smith Curriculum Consultant The Finishing Trades Institute msandln@msn.com

Zane L. Berge Professor of Education University of Maryland, Baltimore County Baltimore, MD 21250 USA

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Research Method 30 Volunteers - No compensation paid- whose ages

vary between 18 to 33 from the Middle East Technical University (METU) Computer Engineering (CENG) Department and from a company have been chosen.

On a determined prepared laptop with a configuration of 4GB RAM and Intel Core Duo 2.53 GHz CPU, both Kaneva and Second Life viewer clients have been installed. Habbo website has been opened as it does not need any viewer client. The three CVEs are open on the same laptop.

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Performed Tasks It is asked to perform two different tasks from the each

volunteer subject. First task is to wonder around a specific place for 5

minutes (300 seconds). These places are the museums in each CVE. The destination place is an Aircraft Museum in Second Life, a Prehistoric Museum in Kaneva and a History Museum in Habbo.

The second task is to communicate with the nearest avatar to him/her. The Instant Messaging (IM) capabilities of these CVEs have been used to fulfill this task. After completion of these 2 tasks, subjects are asked to fill the consolidated presence and immersion questionnaire

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Research MethodConsolidated Questionnaire including 32 questions compiled

from 2 following questionnaires.: Presence Questionnaire (PQ)

Presence was measured using a questionnaire devised by the authors, which was shown to lead to measurements which were both reliable and valid Witmer, Jerome, & Singer’s (2005) 29-item Presence Questionnaire (PQ Version 3)

Version 3 of the PQ uses a seven-point Likert-type scale measured on a 7-point Likert scale, ranging from 1 (not at all) to 7 (completely).

Immersion Tendency Questionnaire (ITQ)

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Results

Average scores of the questionnaire from Likert 7 point scale:

Collaborative Virtual

Environment

Average Score on Consolidated

Questionnaire

Second Life 5.3

Kaneva 4.4

Habbo 3.1

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Discussions

24 of the subjects has chosen Second Life as the most liked CVE among three CVEs. 6 of the subjects have chosen Kaneva as the most liked CVE. The subjects that have chosen Kaneva, have explained the reason as easy to use features of Kaneva. No subject has chosen Habbo as the most liked CVE. The graphical user interface and visual aspects related questions’ average score is the lowest in the Habbo case. In Competence matrix of surveyed multi-user virtual worlds study, [7]at the world realism part it can be seen obviously that 3D feature is a very important factor to increase presence in virtual environments.

[7] Comparative Classification of Multi-User Virtual Worlds, Tony Manninen & Jani Pirkola

Raahe Computer Laboratory of Oulu University Rantakatu 1, 92100 RAAHE, Finland

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Discussions

9 of the subjects have used a CVE before this experiment. Quick adaptation of the usage of CVE has been observed on those experienced CVE users. They have finished the tasks more earlier with respect to the subjects who have not used CVE before this experiment.

11 of the subjects especially stated and commented on the flying capability in the Second Life environment on the questionnaires. Flying capability is a very attracting feature of Second Life and it increases the immersion altough it is not a realistic skill that we can come across or realize in our real daily lives. So, we can not state that always realistic features in CVEs increases presence and immersion.

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Discussions

We understand that CVEs has their own dynamics and conjuncture. The presence and immersion concept can not be thought and designed out of these environments. We should think inside the box during the design of CVEs.

In conclusion of this study, it can be stated that visual aspects of CVEs and the control capabilities of the avatar in a CVE are the two most important factors to increase presence and immersion in CVEs.

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