The impact of different exposure times to 360° video experience on the sense of presence

Equipment such as head-mounted displays are now available for the average consumer at affordable prices. This promotes the usage of this equipment for content consumption and demonstrations, thus it becomes important to establish the best practices for using this technology, namely guidelines in what concerns the recommended exposure time. Therefore, the purpose of this work is to study the impact of the exposure time on the feeling of presence while watching 360° video using an head-mounted display. The independent variables of the study are the exposure time to the stimuli and gender of participants. There were tested four different exposure times: 1 minute, 3 minutes, 5 minutes and 7 minutes. For measuring presence, it was a Portuguese version of the Igroup Presence Questionnaire (IPQ) which considers also 3 presence subscales: spatial presence, realism and involvement. The results have revealed that there are few statistically significant differences for the given exposure times at the level of the sense of presence, apart from spatial presence and realism subscales, which consistently increased with exposure time for male participants and slightly decreased for female ones. Men always needed longer exposure times (> 1 minute) to report the highest scores, while women had the opposite behaviour, frequently reporting maximum scores for the shortest experiences.