A Large Scale Public Experiment on Presence

Good vir­tu­al real­i­ty cre­ates a sense of pres­ence — the feel­ing of real­ly being in the vir­tu­al world. But what caus­es pres­ence to hap­pen? We know that cer­tain fea­tures of a vir­tu­al envi­ron­ment help gen­er­ate pres­ence, but oth­er fea­tures can ham­per or break it entirely.

This appli­ca­tion was an exper­i­ment that mem­bers of the pub­lic could take part in. It was avail­able for Google Card­board for iOS and Android. An ear­ly ver­sion was a sub­mis­sion to the VRJam 2015 for GearVR. The results were pub­lished at IEEE VR in 2016.

You can see a video about the mak­ing of this exper­i­ment on this page.

There is a new­er ver­sion of this study for Ocu­lus Quest

I Want to Take Part

These instruc­tions no longer work and are kept here for archival pur­pos­es. If you want to test Pres­ence Experiment:

Note that you don’t have to agree to data col­lec­tion if you don’t want, you can just run the demonstration.

If you are going to set up your device to show oth­er peo­ple the demon­stra­tion please read Infor­ma­tion for Exper­i­ment Run­ners.

If after tak­ing part in the exper­i­ment, you decide you would like your data delet­ed, please see Data Dele­tion.
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Tell Me More About The Study

If you have have tried the Pres­ence Exper­i­ment already, or want to learn more about the pur­pose of the exper­i­ment please see

Please do not read these pages if you intend to take part in the study at a future point.