Spatial Presence in Real and Remote Immersive Environments

This paper presents an experiment assessing the feeling of spatial presence in both real and remote environments (respectively the socalled “natural presence” and “telepresence”). Twenty-eight (28) participants performed a 3D-pointing task while being located in a real office and the same office remotely rendered over HMD. The spatial presence was evaluated by means of the ITC-SOPI questionnaire and users' behaviour analysis (trajectories of head during the task). The analysis also included the effect of different levels of immersion of the system - visual-only versus visual and audio - rendering in such environments. The results show a higher sense of spatial presence for the remote condition, regardless of the degree of immersion, and for the “visual and audio” condition regardless of the environment. Additionally, trajectory analysis of users' heads reveals that participants behaved similarly in both environments.