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Presence and Fear

Overview

Presence can be described as the feeling of being present in the virtual world
In a recent experiment we investigated the relation between presence and fear. 30 subject participated in the experiment, 15 with fear of heights and 15 without fear of heights. Two virtual worlds were used:
  1. Height world where the subjects had to climb stairs on a construction site
  2. Neutral world where subjects could wander around at ground level
These worlds were experienced under two conditions: high presence and low presence. Presence was manipulated by the level of interactivity of the virtual environment(VE). For the low presence condition people could not interact with the VE at all, in the high presence condition they could look around and navigate and they had to search the environment for small green cubes, which lit up and made a small noise when they were directly in the subject's sight.

Height world Height world
Height world with green cubes for search task

Neutral world
Neutral world

Results show that people with fear of height experienced higher levels of presence in the height world. Surprisingly, the height world did not evoke greater fear in the high presence condition when compared to the low presence condition.

Watch our publications page for full papers on this subject.

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29-aug-2000 Charles van der Mast