How Behavioral, Photographic, and Interactional Realism Influence the Sense of Co-Presence in VR. An Investigation with Psychophysiological Measurement

Abstract

Feeling of co-presence in VR depends on the realism of virtual agents. Our study explores how three dimensions of realism—visual appearance, behavior, and interactability—affect co-presence and Orienting Response (OR), measured using heart rate (HR) and skin conductance response (SCR). Moreover, we test whether HR and SCR can be used as measures of psychological concepts that describe virtual interactions like co-presence. Fourty-five participants passively viewed virtual characters while their HR and SCR were recorded. Afterwards participants assessed the experience of interacting with the virtual agents. The interactability of the virtual characters increased co-presence, and so did heightened appearance realism, but only when the level of behavioral realism was high. High visual and behavioral realism led to increase in SCR while visual realism alone evoked deeper HR deceleration. Nonetheless, neither SCR nor HR correlated with any psychological concepts that describe virtual interactions. In conclusion, realism can increase both the co-presence and magnitude of the OR, yet physiological indices can not reliably gauge the experience of interactions with virtual characters.

Keywords:

• Realism
• co-presence
• VR
• heart rate
• electrodermal activity

Authors’ contributions

RS (Conceptualization, Data curation; Formal analysis, Project administration, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing), AC (Software, Resources), MIC (Software, Resources), JP (Writing – review & editing, Conceptualization, Supervision), NS (Writing – original draft, Data curation), MK (Writing – review & editing, Conceptualization, Supervision).

Disclosure statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Data availability statement

The data as well as virtual character’s presentations are available at: https://osf.io/tfwp6/?view_only=8308cb6f2961487e8acbdd821c4d5484

Additional information

Funding

This work was financed from the budget for science in the years 2019–2023 as a research project “The impact of virtually generated characters: human aspects of bots” (project number: DI2018 015848), under the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of Poland’s Diamond Grant program. The work of M. Igras-Cybulska was supported by the National Science Centre, Poland 2020/04/X/ST6/00626. The work of Joanna Pilarczyk was supported by the National Science Center in Poland (grant number: 2017/25/B/HS6/00758)

Notes on contributors

Radosław Sterna

Radosław Sterna a Principal Investigator in a project financed by the Ministry of Education and Science of Poland. His PhD research focuses on requirements and boundaries of social influence induced by virtual characters.

Artur Cybulski

Artur Cybulski is a designer and developer of interactive virtual environments, in particular for scientific, educational and medical purposes. He has over 10 years of experience in game development, VR/AR, Unity, C#, design, QA and optimization as well as biometric sensors and human-computer interaction.

Magdalena Igras-Cybulska

Magdalena Igras-Cybulska is a biomedical engineer, speech engineer and XR researcher. In her research and development projects she explores the potential of using new interfaces and immersive technology for educational and societal applications. Co-author of over 60 articles on speech technology and virtual reality.

Joanna Pilarczyk

Joanna Pilarczyk is a post-doc at the Institute of Psychology, the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. Her PhD thesis concerned the impact of image features on visual attention and emotional reaction. Her current projects focus on the role of beliefs and motivations in the processing of social and emotional stimuli.

Natalia Segiet

Natalia Segiet PhD student at Jagiellonian University Collegium Medicum. Working with seniors diagnosed with neurocognitive problems and with kids. Scientifically, interested in non-pharmacological cognitive therapies and new technologies.

Michał Kuniecki

Michał Kuniecki is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Psychology at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. He studies emotion and visual perception. His interests include the role of formal features of visual stimuli and their meaning in engaging spatial attention and eliciting emotional responses.