An Empirical Study on Spatial Presence in Immersive Geo-Environments
Florian Hruby, León Felipe Álvarez‐Sánchez, Rainer Ressl, Elva Escobar‐Briones
Abstract
Abstract Research on immersive virtual reality (VR) indicates that VR technologies facilitate understanding through the formation of spatial presence, which is the user’s feeling of “being there” in a virtual place. These findings make VR a highly interesting tool for geographic information science and the visualization of geospatial phenomena. However, immersion and presence are often studied under laboratory conditions, while research on virtual representations of real-world environments is still rare. This paper aims to reduce this gap empirically through a user study on spatial presence in immersive geo-environments. A total of 60 subjects entered a VR replica of a coral reef in the Mexican Caribbean built upon WorldView2 imagery. After testing within- and between-subject performance under both VR headset- and desktop-based visualization conditions, all users completed the IPQ self-report questionnaire to evaluate the sense of presence experienced. The results indicate a strong effect of immersion, leading to statistically significant higher levels of spatial presence in immersive geo-environments.