Displaced cultural objects often act as mediators of intercultural understanding due to their connection between the original and host communities. This study explores how immersive embodied VR biography enhances intercultural empathy and understanding of displaced cultural objects. We took the famous Chinese painting, the Admonitions Scroll, housed at the British Museum as an example to design an Immersive Biography in VR. We conducted an empirical study with 24 participants from source and non-source communities. Findings suggested that interacting with biographical narratives of displaced cultural objects in a personified embodied way can effectively promote intercultural empathy and understanding. Additionally, simulated intercultural scenarios and dialogues with personified cultural objects fostered intercultural empathy in both groups, with a stronger effect observed in non-source communities due to differences in cultural identity and personal connections. Our study provided the potential and practical insights of immersive technologies to inspire intercultural communication for displaced cultural objects.
Within the virtual reality (VR) research community, there have been several efforts to develop questionnaires with the aim of better understanding the sense of presence. Despite having numerous surveys, the community does not have a questionnaire that informs which components of a VR application contributed to the sense of presence. Furthermore, previous literature notes the absence of consensus on which questionnaire or questions should be used. Therefore, we conducted a Delphi study, engaging presence experts to establish a consensus on the most important presence questions and their respective verbiage. We then conducted a validation study with an exploratory factor analysis (EFA). The efforts between our two studies led to the creation of the Fidelity-based Presence Scale (FPS). With our consensus-driven approach and fidelity-based factoring, we hope the FPS will enable better communication within the research community and yield important future results regarding the relationship between VR system fidelity and presence.
Leveraging the integration of visual and proprioceptive cues, research has uncovered various perception thresholds in VR that can be exploited to support haptic feedback for grasping. While previous studies have explored individual dimensions, such as size, the combined effect of multiple geometric properties on perceptual illusions remains poorly understood. We present a two-alternative forced choice study investigating the perceptual interplay between object size and taper angle. We introduce an illusion space model, providing detailed insights into how physical and virtual object configurations affect human perception. Our insights reveal how, for example, as virtual sizes increase, users perceive that taper angles increase, and as virtual angles decrease, users overestimate sizes. We provide a mathematical model of the illusion space, and an associated tool, which can be used as a guide for the design of future VR haptic devices and for proxy object selections.
Presence is an important and widely used metric to measure the quality of virtual reality (VR) applications. Given the multifaceted and subjective nature of presence, the most common measures for presence are questionnaires. But there is little research on their validity regarding specific presence dimensions and their responsiveness to differences in perception among users. We investigated four presence questionnaires (SUS, PQ, IPQ, Bouchard) on their responsiveness to intensity variations of known presence dimensions and asked users about their consistency with their experience. Therefore, we created five VR scenarios that were designed to emphasize a specific presence dimension. Our findings showed heterogeneous sensitivity of the questionnaires dependent on the different dimensions of presence. This highlights a context-specific suitability of presence questionnaires. The questionnaires' sensitivity was further stated as lower than actually perceived. Based on our findings, we offer guidance on selecting these questionnaires based on their suitability for particular use cases.
This paper examines how strategies for simulating social presence across distance can evoke a sense of presence and facilitate illusory interactions across time. We conducted a mixed-methods study with 28 participants, exploring their emotional experience of interacting with decade-old recorded piano performances on MirrorFugue—a player piano enhanced with life-sized projections of the pianist’s hands and body, creating the illusion of a virtual reflection playing the instrument. Data were collected via wearable sensors, questionnaires, and interviews.
Results showed that participants felt a strong presence of past pianists, with some experiencing the illusion of two-way communication and an overall increase in connection. The emotional experience was significantly influenced by the participant’s relationship with the recorded pianist and the pianist's vital status. These findings suggest that telepresence technologies can foster connections with the past, offering spaces for memory recall, self-reflection, and a sense of “time travel.”
In the context of computational thinking tasks, which often require problem-solving and critical thinking skills, awareness of a partner’s actions can play a significant role in fostering a balanced collaboration. Understanding how awareness influences mixed-
visual ability group collaboration in a tangible environment can provide insights into inclusive design for learning environments. To address this issue, we ran a user study where 6 mixed-visual ability pairs engaged in a tangible programming activity. The study
had three experimental conditions, representing 3 different levels of awareness. Our findings reveal that while pre-existing power dynamics heavily influenced collaboration, workspace awareness feedback was essential in fostering engagement and improving
communication for both children. This paper highlights the need for designing inclusive collaborative programming systems that account for workspace awareness and individual abilities, offering insights into more effective and balanced collaborative environments.
Presence appears an important concept for virtual reality (VR): It is frequently measured with questionnaires, and theory and methods about it have been discussed in numerous works. Yet, it is unclear how to actually work with this concept: Why is presence important to measure, how to choose an appropriate questionnaire, and what to conclude about it based on findings? To answer these questions, we review how the concept is put to work in 288 VR papers from 2023 measuring presence with questionnaires. Our findings include that measuring presence is often motivated by another construct, such as user experience; the reasons for choosing a specific questionnaire are often weak or not reported at all; and high presence values are frequently used simply to validate an interaction technique. We propose recommendations for working with presence and formulate questions to direct future research.