A Framework to Model and Control the State of Presence in Virtual Reality Systems

This work is concerned with the modelling and control of the state of presence of a user in a virtual reality system (VRS). The manner how the state of a user interacting with the VRS is measured by some of its physiological signals is discussed. Based on the user-VRS interaction, a novel feedback control schema to manipulate the user state is proposed. In this, the error between the required and the actual user behavior is used by a controller to select the appropriate stimulus that must be executed by the VRS core scenario to reduce the error. The schema includes the modelling of the presence state by a discrete event strategy based on Petri Nets. Based on the obtained model, the control strategy to select the appropriate stimuli is devised. Finally, some real experiments with a VRS prototype are carried out to show the effectiveness of the proposal.